Thanks for those hardware links, those are super helpful

Also, I managed to increase my hash rates! Using the recommended flags "-v -w 128" on my ATI cards increased my hash rates by about 20%, and there is a momentary spike into the 200s if I add the flag "-f 0".
Speaking of parameters, I can't seem to find a list of possible parameters that are used with this poclbm miner. Does anyone know if they are listed and explained somewhere? I seem to see "-k" in some of those hardware reports, but have no idea what it is or if that's on modded version of the miner.
For the solo'ing, I was thinking about running it on one computer overnight sometimes as a pure gamble. I am already mining for a pool. But again, it seems that there is a problem with solo atm? Are people resorting to a miner other than poclbm to solo for now?