@ derm and aysyr : thank you for the coins! they seem to have at least partially solved my mining issue. Once I had a positive GRC balance in my wallet several beacons were sent after about 40 mins. I had my gridcoin.conf file including cpupoolmining=true and the client sent out 6 beacons. Is this expected? I received 7 payments over the next 6-7 hours of between 8 to 34 GRC. Does that sound about right?

So then to test solo mining I removed cpupoolmining=true from the conf file and after running for 8 hours I've yet to receive anything. Does having started out cpupool mining prevent me from then solo mining? With the following stats: Boinc proc power: 67, thread count: 2 & Avg Daily Credits: 346, what can I reckon to wait for a payout (roughly)? Or have I missed something again?

AndrewP: it's easy to omit what seems obvious in a tutorial, besides I leaned a lot about the rest of the mechanics of Gridcoin while trying to figure out my specific problem.

Thanks.