Admins, please delete my account.  Thanks.

Thanks everyone for all the input.  It definitely helps sort out the whole mining issues I've had.  Last few questions:

When joining a pool, other than helping to solve the hash and helping to generate revenue for myself, others and the pool owners, am I contributing to the bigger picture of BitCoin? 

Outside of development (which I lack any skill for programming) and evangilism, what other ways can I or my machine contribute to the bitcoin community? 

Ah ok!  <light bulb goes on>  I wasn't sure if the difficulty rate was proportionate to the # number of miners, and probably more to do with the combined hashing capacity of those miners correct? 

Is mining cumulative?  Meaning if I wait those 500 days I should see a payout of the 25BTC or does everything start over once a block is solved? Excuse me if this is stated in Satoshi's original paper, I'm still working through it.   

So theoretically the online calculators are really a "best case scenario" where at the current difficulty rate, if you were the only one mining, this is what you could expect.  Safe to assume those calculators don't take into account the other miners?  Or is that what factors the difficulty rate?  And I really appreciate all the quick replies.  And can anyone respond to the question if your internet B/W connection has any affect to mining? Or is this a searchable topic previously covered?

So if I understand correctly, if I'm solo mining.  I have to solve a whole block before receiving anything?  If I join a pool, I'm "paid" by how much work my machine does if that pool solves the block?

Ok, that makes sense.  I know that going solo is the hardway to go and would take longer to see any results.  I seen some posts on the GUIMiner support thread that showed quick results, so I wasn't sure if I had set everything up correctly. Was more concerned whether or not I was actually mining and that it's configured right.  I'm going to look into the pooling and research that.  Does your internet speed also affect your ability to mine? 

Not sure if my expectations are just too high or if I might not have configured something correctly.  I'm using GUIMiner along with two Gigabyte HD7970 GPU's.  I'm setup for Solo mining.  My Bitcoin-QT is synced and it looks like the OpenCL stuff is connected correctly as GUIMiner says it's mining.  I'm averaging about 1GH/s, but have not seen any transactions or BTC come through yet in the Bitcoin-QT app.  Even when I set the display to show nanoBTC or microBTC, I don't see anything.  I've been running the rig 24/7 for the last week.  Should I be seeing something?  How can I tell if I'm actually mining?  The column under Accepted shows about 56K and (300+).  Does that mean it's working and I just need to be patient?  Do I need to switch to a different miner?  Any good information, including links to other topics would be great or point me where I need to do my research.  Specs of my rig below.

Single AMD FX1 Black series 3.6GHz quad core CPU
8GB RAM
Samsung Pro 128GB SSD
Gigabyte AMD mobo
2 x Gigabyte HD 7970 GPU's