must have been a random issue with spotify perhaps. I now can log in with both N900 and N9. To answer your questions though, I always use online mode in qspot. I'll keep my eye on it and will report back if the issue persists. Thanks for the help though. Love qspot. Keeps my day going.

edit: turns out spotify did some maintenance on their servers and had a minor outage that affected some folks. https://twitter.com/SpotifyStatus