How to redeem deposits to my wallet A couple of days ago I installed bitcoin-qc and loaded the latest block from eu1.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/. Then to test it out I withdrew a small amount of BTCs from my mtgo account to the address that appeared in the client upon install. Not having received anything yet, I today went to blockexplorer.com and search for that address. The record shows "First seen?: Block 164269 (2012-01-28 19:37:08)" and "Received transactions: 1", but also says "Public key?: Unknown (not seen yet)". The client says today, "Catching up... Downloaded 164146 blocks of transaction history. Last received block was generated 2 days ago". Do I have to send a public key separately? If so, how do I do it? Thanks for taking the time for a beginner.
Your client won't show the transaction until it's received the block the transaction was included in. This website has the block count in the header: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/ 

Right this moment, there are 164472 blocks (and I'm responding to your question quickly) so there's clearly still some downloading to do. Try to determine whether the block download is still occurring, and work from there. There should be a percentage complete figure for the block download in the bitcoin-qc client.