How to transfer addresses?

[dmcglaun]

There may be a simpler way to do this.  Here's the situation:

I have not logged into my bitcoin wallet client for a year.  I wanted to buy more, so I managed to dig my wallet out of encryption and everything's fine.  I bought some small amount of BTC and waited all night for the transaction to hit the wallet.  All kinds of blocks transferred, all kinds of new acks of my previous transactions, but nothing new.

I noticed that I have a very old client, and would like to use the newest bitcoin-qt.  But it can't read the old database files (must create them new and re-download the whole blockchain).  I don't mind doing that, but in the new client, all my old addresses (namely, the addresses the new BTC purchases are coming to) are not in the address book.

Question is, am I LOCKED into continuing to use the old client and download more blocks until I get to the ones my current transactions are in?  I'm worried about the upcoming 5/15 deadline to change over.

Or can I get those addresses transferred to the new client so that I can start fresh within it?

And how long will this take?  How many blocks are out there now?  (My old client is at about 168k blocks.)

Thanks for any advice.

[elebit]

Your client just hasn't downloaded the blockchain yet. You can always check what the latest block number is, for example here: http://blockexplorer.com/q/getblockcount. (Roughly 230k blocks right now.)

Alternatively, you can install a newer client but keep your wallet.dat. As soon as the blockchain is downloaded your funds should be visible. Just remember to guard that wallet.dat with your .. well, guard it well. Multiple encrypted backups, at the very least.