Thank you for your explanations and continued assistance. DHT options are enabled and dht.rate is -1. I believe the firewall is the only security software running. I added a torrent to see what the Tracker tab says. Here is the complete text:
[Local Peer Discovery] working
[Peer Exchange] working
[DHT] waiting for ann...
http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce offline (timed out)
http://tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce offline (timed out)
udp://tracker.openbitorrent.com:80/announce invalid URL
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce invalid URL
udp://tracker.thepiratebay.org:80/annunce invalid URL
http://tracker.openbittorent.com/announce connection closed by peer
Next to each of the url's there is either a running counter or it says "updating". For each entry it shows 0/0 peers/seeds.
Also, I noticed the following error under the Logger tab:
[2009-11-07 15:03:45] Error opening Windows firewall: 0x80070005 Access is denied.
Hopefully we are narrowing it down!