Plus if you solo mine you sometimes get blocks worth 500 (3 of those for me) to yourself instead of hoping they get split properly
Speaking of such, I just mined a 500 coins block after posting above :-) I mined 3 x 500's so far and 1 x 1,000. It's totally worth it at the 0.2x difficulty.
For the guys having issues with the qt client not showing the correct number of blocks. The client is showing the number of blocks left
To Be Mined and not what's already been mined. This will
NOT effect your mining, even if solo. My cgminer has been hashing away for day with the client showing "Out Of Sync" and I am still able to find blocks and see when a new block is found on the network through cgminer, which also reflects the number of blocks left to be mined in the qt client as the number drops every time a block is found.
Ya I had this same thing happen while I was away from my system and although "out of sync" everything went fine. I did delete everything from AppData dir aside from wallet.dat and .conf file then restarted and everything went back to normal too. So that's a quick fix for those that don't want to see it