PieCoin is a great coin, I love it!
As far as I can see the most problems are with the network connections.
So I would like to give some help:
You don't have to edit the PieCoin.conf file (wherever it resides at your system) to get new connections.
You just have to call the 'Debug Window' at the Help Menu and there to select the 'Console' tab.
There you can add existing nodes by typing:
addnode x.x.x.x add (where x.x.x.x is the ip of the node to add)
if you don't want to restart wallet client after this, you can simply do the following afterwards:
addnode x.x.x.x onetry (again x.x.x.x the ip of the node)
if the node you want to add has it's port 31415 open (i.e. it's a server node), your client will connect.
Unfortunately a lot of the nodes at
http://piecoin.thecryptochat.net/network are not 'open' nodes so that a direct connection will not work.
This is the same problem which one has with the entries of non-server nodes at the PieCoin.conf file - an explanation why it is not working for so many people even if they edited the conf file in the right way.
So to be easy:
you can add the following two stable nodes to your wallet client by following the instructions above and entering:
addnode 82.165.162.27 add
addnode 82.165.162.27 onetry
addnode 81.89.100.38 add
addnode 81.89.100.38 onetry
they should be easily added to your client without a restart and still present after.
And another very important information:
You can improve the number of connections and the download speed of an unsynchronized blockchain simply by opening port 31415 for incoming connections at the computer your wallet client is running. In a lot of cases this has to do with port forwarding at the router - unfortunately :/
I hope this could help someone and we can make PieCoin a great coin together - please don't be bothered by C-Cex trolls, I'm sure they will be gone soon.