Just think–after it’s all overwith, you get to move in to your new place! You can join me in unpacked box hell!
My recent home buying experience was a very strange one. I knew almost nothing about and no one in this town (Greensboro, NC). My third visit here was my house-hunting trip, which consisted of one day in which we saw at least a dozen houses. My fourth visit was for the closing, with a Ryder full of stuff behind me.
As it happened, though, things couldn’t have gone better. We independently fell in love with the same house, and then learned that it had been on the market for several months. It isn’t hard to see why–it’s an older house in an older neighborhood, meaning that the house isn’t as (for lack of a better word) “fancy” as the pseudo-McMansions in the same price range, but it has some personality and some space between the houses. (This was a pet peeve.) The owners had also made some interesting decorating choices, such as a screaming yellow kitchen with pink and green pastel cabinet doors.
Since we liked everything else about the house (and I like the kitchen, for that matter–CrazyCatLady is less fond, to say the least), we went for it. We plan to sell the house in three years, and before then we plan to make the kitchen a little more inviting. We’re also going to finish some of the unfinished basement, which will add to the square footage of the house and up its value considerably.
The inspections revealed the house to be in remarkable shape for its age. The seller was cooperative in fixing up the things that did concern us. The house appraised for quite a bit more than we ended up paying for it. The loan went smoothly. The closing lasted fifteen minutes.
Now that we’ve moved in, we haven’t had a single regret. We keep finding out more things that we like about the house, the neighborhood, and the town.
All that said, I can’t really make any recommendations, except to move someplace where the market is rather sluggish at the moment 
and to look past features like strange colors and see what you’re willing to do to the place.
Athena–in your case, the long time spent on the market may be sort of a self-perpetuating prophecy. As I said, this place was on the market for about eight months when we bought it, and even though we loved the house, that in itself was a big concern for us. What are we missing, we thought? It turns out the house had been somewhat overpriced at the beginning, so between that, the weird colors, the absolutely dead post-9/11 housing market, and the fact that it’s an older house in a McMansion kind of town, it all makes sense. Before I bought your house, I’d want to know exactly why it had been sitting there unsold for so long, and since you don’t know the answer to that question yourself, I doubt it’s going to be answered to the satisfaction of a potential buyer.
Dr. J