Well my vote is for Litecoin definitely. It's more profitable mining than bitcoin (just exchange them for BTC as you mine if you don't have longer term ambitions with LTC).

With any luck you won't need much tweaking of settings to hit your stride. I'm new to this too but it didn't take long to get 650kH/s off each of my 2 x 7950 cards. Using GUIminer definitely helps with some of the initially overwhelming tech settings.