You are very welcome, I'm glad I could contribute and help someone out. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to let me know.
-------------------- Everywhere I go, I see myself.
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I am glad it helped. Unfortunately because of the very nature of how Tor works it is pretty much stuck being 'random' if it were to connect to the same network, using the same relays and exits every time than it would be counter productive to anonymity. As for 'defining new parameters' such as 'Only connect and exit using Tor relays in the U.S.' I am sure you could edit Privoxy's config.txt file to only use U.S. relays, BUT if you were to do this it would most likely only cause even more problems. Mainly because, if you look at the Network map you see the connections being forwarded from the U.S. to W. Europe and sometimes back again. So any connection you did make would also need to have the same defining parameters in place otherwise you would connect to a relay in lets say D.C. that forwards to another relay in lets say Berlin, but your machine would refuse to continue the connection to Berlin and you would have no internet connectivity. Unfortunately the very thing that makes Tor so great for Anonymity is also what causes the slow speeds sometimes, and that means random and multiple 'hops' before exiting Tor and initiating a website session. However there is hope, as more and more people use Tor and setup relays and exits than the more choices we will start to get and speeds will continue to increase. Just as a torrent is faster with more 'seeds' Tor is faster with more exits and relays. When I was writing the guide I was using an Exit located in Houston and had nearly 100% speed, but after a few minutes my exit switched to one in Germany, (This is that unknown factor you are talking about) and that happened for one of two most likely causes. Either the exit in Houston was shutoff completely or the more likely cause is that when you configure Tor to be an exit on your machine you can define several parameters, such as which protocols are allowed to exit and the maximum bandwidth allowed. So when I was connected to the exit in Houston there may have been a dozen other people also exiting from that same machine and when I started to request more and more bandwidth it exceeded what was allowed so the Vidalia suite then switched to another exit in an effort to get my requests out of the network faster or just get them out at all because that Houston exit may have only had a trickle of bandwidth left, if any. I know it sucks that sometimes you have to wait several seconds for a page to load, or spend a few minutes trying to find a good connection speed but sacrificing a little bit of time to ensure your security is a fair trade I say, even if it is a little frustrating at times, I still think it's worth it. As for additional extensions to help make your connection faster, no I don't think there are any. There are other proxy programs such as SwitchProxy but it has a serious security flaw. I strongly advise against using any other extensions, especially if you try to use them with Vidalia. Your most likely going to end up with no internet connection if you have multiple programs trying to bounce your packets around. Yes the Onion is supposed to stay green unless you click on 'Stop Tor' in the Vidalia control panel which disconnects you from the Tor network completely, clicking on the 'Tor Enabled/Disabled' text (Which you can right click and change to an Onion Icon instead of text if you want) in the lower right corner of Firefox (Not the system tray) just tells Firefox if it should use a proxy or not but your machine is still on the Tor network, your just not using it when you disable it in the Firefox window. It is setup this way so you can continue to be a relay and/or exit for the Tor network even though your not currently using it. I hope this helps answer your questions and further your understanding of how the Vidalia suite works. Sorry I don't have an easy fix for slow speeds, but it's honestly worth the little extra time especially if your doing something you don't want anyone to know about.
-------------------- Everywhere I go, I see myself.
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