Just got through the full thread, WOW!  Tons of work into this.

I just got a USB stick running to play with mining, and while pointed at the ckpool the CG miner has popped up with "2017-09-27 18:04:01] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block"

As that obviously was not a solve, what does the new block detected refer to?  Apologies if this is the wrong forum to ask in.