Thanks for the info.  I've also never really solo mined before or used anything other than standard scrypt mining(outside of thorcoin which I never got to work right solo).  Could you confirm that these are the right total noob steps from what I've gleaned from other (possibly wrong) sources for solo mining?

0. get miner early.
1. download and run wallet.
2. Close wallet so helix.conf file is generated
3. put miner in ? directory?
3. set rpcuser and rpc password to anything I want in helix.conf?
4. start wallet an leave it running
5. run cgminer using the following assuming user/pass/port is X :  cgminer.exe --keccak --no-submit-stale -o 127.0.0.1:X -u x -p x

Does the mining software have to be in the same directory as the wallet software or is it in the /roaming/helix/ dir where the helix.conf lives?
Can I set the user/pass to anything or does it have to be my wallet address or something?  I see in the miner example bat included in the miner from the OP they put what appears to be a wallet address even though they appear to be using a pool.
Is the user/pass/port I set in the .conf file important for anything else but the cgminer instance I'm running?

I'm sorry for the really dumb questions but I've not been able to get it to work successfully and I know I'm missing something stupid and I really want this to actually work for the few seconds my 6950 can actually do something productive after launch.  I was going to try and set it up with maxcoin but I can't seem to get the wallet to sync.