Okay so after many re formats and moving over to ubuntu 13.10 I finally got the keccack version of 3.7.2 to work.

Now the last problem I encountered is the fact that cgminer was reporting 600-700kh/s on both my 290 and 290x even though they were only pulling around ~200w combined from the wall and had pretty much no load. I tried a bunch of flags from the litecoin wiki for my cards which did change the kh/s a bit but still wouldn't put a decent load on the cards.

I'm out of town until Wednesday so sadly I won't be able to investigate anymore until then.