Well, I finally broke down and decided to launch the daemon on a spare PC running Ubuntu 16.06 rather than my laptop. Thanks to advice from jwinterm I was able to successfully bootstrap the blockchain and recover my wallet on what is now my Aeon node PC. Mining on sumominer now and its a world of difference. I still don't know how much I was losing by mining on minergate but it was a substantial amount. Now my mining rewards match my hashrate almost exactly and I'm averaging 99% good shares. Very happy now. GO AEON!!!