Bitcoin-qt 0.8.5 did not suggest a fee while using proxy, now stuck with 0 conf

I've been using bitcoin-qt for a while. However, there are certain websites which aggregate bitcoin node IP address and geoip/whois locations. I believe this is highly undesirable (I question the motives of the operators of such sites too).

As a result I installed TOR and setup the proxy preferences for my client, after I had my ISP change my external statically assigned IP.

I then sent ~0.3 BTC to an exchange with bitcoin-qt, it asked for my password, but it did not suggest a fee, instead it immediately sent the transaction with no fee (confirmed via listtransactions).

I notice in the preferences that it is set to not include a fee (it is set to "0.00000000 BTC" fee per kb), however this seems to be the default setting (even though this client has previously suggested fees while making a transaction previously)?

Could this behavior be related to the addition of the proxy config, which from what I understand disables "listen" in qt clients. I think that regardless it is time I move to more lightweight client, but it would be interesting to see if others are having this problem.

(EDIT: The transaction of course confirmed, but this was still a substantial delay, about 8 hours.)