Vidalia GUI fails to respect changes in proxy settings

[vidalia]

At work all my connections go through a proxy. So in the Vidalia control panel, under the Network section, I check "I use a proxy to access the Internet" and fill in the relevant details. This works fine.

However if I subsequently leave the office, connect somewhere else, uncheck the "I use a proxy to access the Internet", and save the settings, Tor still fails to start -- throwing error messages in the Log saying "Couldn't look up <proxy name>. Failed to parse/validate config: HttpProxy? failed to parse or resolve. Please fix."

Exiting and restarting Vidalia doesn't help.

At the moment I can't seem to clear this. Even assigning a dummy proxy name like "foo" within the control panel and then saving doesn't help -- the Tor error still quotes the proxy name that was last used successfully at the office. The only two things I haven't tried yet are 1) going back to the office, connecting successfully, then removing the proxy setting and saving; and 2) doing an uninstall/reinstall of the whole Vidalia package.

Note: I have only tried this on WinXP. I have no idea if it affects other platforms.

[edmanm]

This one is interesting. When you make changes to your Tor configuration in Vidalia, Vidalia remembers your changes and then applies them via Tor's control port the next time Tor is started. Tor apparently refuses to start if it can't resolve your HttpProxy, so Vidalia never has a chance to apply your updated settings.

One temporary solution would be to edit your torrc manually before starting Tor. On Windows, you can find the saved torrc under %APPDATA%\Vidalia\torrc.