I tried 8193 on a whim, and same thing. I really appreciate all of your help, but I think you're perhaps barking up the wrong tree. My thoughts are that this may be an adaptive n-scrypt specific issue, or perhaps a bug in vertminer.
My answer was directly towards the error -5 that you're getting, which in cgminer (vertminer is obviously a child of cgminer) is mostly due to misconfiguration of the TC value.
Try lowering intensity alongside your TC value see what happens.Nevermind, just read your latest post, I see you did that.