Well, this morning, I got the wallet working. To cut a long story short I found an old diary which had a few passwords in the notes section I completely forgot about using. Got in after a few combos and after refresh not as many coins as I remembered 81M - I might have another wallet somewhere. But this is on the daemon/simplewallet I downloaded last week!  I am looking through other backups.

Now mining BCN (is it best to use Claymore?) and am checking other alts as well.
I found the cryptonote site (cryptonight?) and am also looking at coins on the list - what other coins are popular? I see Monero mentioned a lot in this thread and on ALTS - I already downloaded and mining that one. It has a lot fewer coins - so mining is a bit slow!  Do all these cryptonotes basically look and work the same?