It is worth noting that the Vidalia bundle for Tor 0.2.0.9-alpha comes with Vidalia 0.0.15, which manages its own torrc file, and in some cases this can cause problems. This is not a bug within Tor itself, but readers of this mailing list who use the Vidalia bundle should take note.
When you start up Vidalia for the first time, it does use the torrc you supplied to start Tor, so your settings are used. Then Vidalia would overwrite torrc with its own version, which for the most part does preserve whatever custom torrc settings you had (e.g. HttpProxy and ExcludeNodes), but some other settings are not preserved (e.g. __allDirActionsPrivate). So next time you start Vidalia, it will be using its own version of torrc, without some of your custom settings. For those who depend on __allDirActionsPrivate (e.g. to stay under the radar of an overzealous WebSense filter), this means every time after running Vidalia, you'll have to edit torrc and add "__allDirActionsPrivate 1" back in. A ticket has already been filed with the Vidalia project regarding this issue. - John
