That's because it has nothing to do with Windows. I should write a tutorial on troubleshooting common Tor connection problems. It would go something like this... First check if your internet connection sucks in general. If you're having trouble connecting to clearnet sites, fix your internet connection. If your internet connection is good, look at the error messages. If you see: Closing stream for '[scrubbed].onion': hidden service is unavailable (try again later). That means the hidden service descriptor isn't published, which means the server is most likely down. When you see this error message, the connection dies very quickly, in 3-5 seconds. If you see: Tried for [usually 120] seconds to connect to '[scrubbed].onion'. Giving up or anything about an introduction point, a rendezvous point, or rend desc (the rendezvous descriptor) That means either you or the hidden service failed in establishing connections to each other. Read up on how that works: https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en At this point you can refresh the list of relays and get a new identity (build new circuits). If you still get an error along those lines (and/or the error includes words like "waiting" or "timed out"), the hidden service is having problems, either because its internet connection sucks, or because it is overloaded from users, or there may be other reasons, but at that point there's nothing you can do about it. Try again in a few hours.