Thanks Dave_bbp, that helps a lot.

Weird thing happened last night, I had another solo mining lump sum in my transaction list with the dove icon, the coins were "immature", but this time rather than mature and move to my balance they simply disappeared after a while. 

Any ideas why?  Is there some action that I can take from the "repair wallet" to retrieve?

Hi guys, sorry if this has been answered somewhere before, but I can't find any information and I'd like to learn more about it since I'm not a "super" user.

During the pool issues in the last few days, I suspect my 5 machines switched to solo mining because one morning I found a lump sum of coins transferred in my wallet with the dove symbol and an entry under the transaction list called "mined".   What I'm trying to understand is this:

if the usual setup for solo mining in the cfg lines do not contain any workerID or user information, how come that the "mined" coins got transferred to me to my main wallet where the automatic payment is setup?

I.e. is it a case of a huge coincidence that the machine where I have my main wallet got lucky in picking a block to solve or is it that somehow all 5 machines mined solo but they managed to cumulatively pool (no pun intended) the generated coins into a single transfer to the wallet?

Also, how exactly does one switch a machine from pool to solo mining?   The main website instructs to use ONLY the following:

addnode=node.biblepay.org 
gen=1 
genproclimit=x

Is this enough or should some user information be included somewhere in there too?

Obviously I'm more interested in being part of the community in the pool, but during time of issues I feel would be good to know how to have a plan "B" for temporary performance.    I took the last 3 days as a chance to test it (inspired by the mined lump sum) but with the cfg settings above not a single coin came through. 

If someone could provide some clarification or point me in the direction of the information I'd be very grateful.

Sorry about the long post and thanks.