B.e.g.i.n.n.e.r Tor Q.u.e.s.t.i.o.n.s

[John Doe]

I've read the FAQs, Wikis, related information on official and
external sites, discussions on the web and groups. My beginner
questions are as follows. Please humor me, I'm new. I'm running Tor as
a client only, with Privoxy for web browsing.

1. When behind a router, do I need to forward specific ports even if I
show up on ip checker web sites with exit node IP's and tor checker
websites state tor is working? I'm running a client only. If port
forwarding is required, would the developers of Tor consider adding a
cmd line option for Tor to perform this automatically with each run,
as many Bittorrent clients do?

2. I've noticed the following text lately with either 'Directory' or
'Socks' mentioned at the end where 'X' is, what does this indicate?:
"We stalled too much while trying to write # bytes to address
[scrubbed].  If this happens a lot, either something is wrong with
your network connection, or something is wrong with theirs. (fd #,
type X, state #"

3. How can I verify Tor is handling DNS SOCKS connections correctly?
It said it was working with the TestSocks option activated, but what
of the 'Socks' error in #2 above?

4. For use of tsocks apart from web browsing, should the config file
match the information tor-tsocks contains?

5. What do 'gzip decompression' errors mean?

6. Do I use the DNSPort option with Privoxy or only for applications
which make no use of a proxy? Is there an easy way to enable DNSPort?

7. Often when I am loading several web pages in tabs with Tor,
everything will come to a stop, and websites appear to hang without
loading until I stop and reload, or a Privoxy error page shows saying
it could not be resolved. Should I only load one page at a time with
Tor?

TIA