I don't know if I was clear about this, but this is not just a delay. Tor is actually exiting. The message box says: Vidalia detected that Tor exited unexpectedly. Please check the message log for indicators about what happened to Tor before it exited." The system tray icon is the "black onion" and the hover context says "Tor is stopped". I do not think that waiting is a solution, it seems to be a final state.Since the Tor network is becoming larger and some servers are not very fast, it's normal to take some time to build the first circuit.
So, what you should do is just calm down and wait for a while.
Yes, they are interesting. These are from 2 different runs... I tried upgrading to another version, thinking the behavior might be different. It appears that the second version does not recognize that log setting at all. However all the behavior and error messages are the same, for both runs, so the debug info probably would be the same. I did check the .torrc to make sure I still have "Log debug file c:/program files/tor/debug.log". It exists, so I guess logging just doesn't work in the newer version.(PS, these two entries are interesting: Apr 22 00:34:46:390 [Notice] Tor v0.1.2.12-rc. This is experimental... Apr 22 00:08:41.531 [notice] Tor 0.1.1.26 opening new log file. Why the version numbers are different?