blocks not downloaded

[rogerdv]

After asking here why my transaction wasnt completed after 3 days, I found that the bitcoin client must download the complete block list before starting to process transactions. But my client seems to be stucked at 18060 blocks since days ago and there are no signs of changing that. Is there any way to solve that? I have 0.1 floating somewhere that I cant use and I dont know if I should continue mining if I cant get my bitcoins.

[Snipa]

With about 135k blocks in the chain right now, it sounds like you're pretty far behind.  I'd suggest checking your debug logs to see if it can't connect to the IRC server where most of this is managed.  Other than that?  You may wish to wipe the entire bitcoin settings folder.

For reference, on Win 7, it should be: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin  You'll want to make sure you've got at least half a gig free of space, as the current chain/index on my machine is about 510Mb.

[Auspician]

You can download the Block Chain manually from here and then copy it into your C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin directory.  You might need to show hidden files and folders in order to locate this directory, but by downloading the Block Chain manually you'll be within a couple hundred blocks of the entire chain at a far faster pace than waiting for your BTC client to download them all one-by-one.

[rogerdv]

Thanks for the help! By the way, if I remove the whole config folder (I use linux, so it is .bitcoin), what happens to my addresses? Should I save the wallet.dat file?

[Auspician]

Honestly I have no experience with Linux, but the only truly important file is wallet.dat.  That's the file that stores your coins, everything else can be recreated by installing the Bitcoin client again and then overrighting the wallet.dat file that is created on first run with your saved wallet.dat.