Okay, I stand corrected. I just tried again with the official Bitcoin client. It took a while, but it did finally connect and begin downloading blocks. I will turn my attention to the miner instead. Sorry for the distraction.
Also, thank you for answering some questions I had (but hadn't asked) about the nature of the protocol. I can understand why the developers would want to leverage existing solutions (like TOR) to simplify the development process and focus on other areas first. Again though, this may effectively limit the user-base to roughly that of whatever solution is being leveraged. I hope the plan is to eventually build encryption into the client, thus widening its appeal to include users who know what Paypal is (for example), but have no idea what TOR is or how to use it.
Thank you for your time, theymos.
i guess this thread is closed and only answer your question about Tor.
It is a network of computers that use a thing called onion routing (wikipedia -> onion routing if you'd like to know more)
In the Tor network there are 'exit nodes', 'routers' and 'clients'
Idea of onion routing is that the client is connected to a number or routers and sends his requests to the routers.
The routers then pass the requests to exit nodes.
Each connection is encrypted using a different pair of keys ensuring that the router does not know the content of the request and the result of the request. The exit node does not know who requested the data.
This makes the logs of the websites (and other services) pretty much useless because they contain only data about the exit nodes and no information on the clients, who used the service. The network has more than 300.000 clients (somewhere on the torproject.org site is the statistics section). this makes the use pretty anonymous.
If tou and your application use Tor, your location remains anonymized by the tor network. by it's design your true ip remains hidden.