there were no threads, so the cpu wasn't working.
Sorry I'm still a bit confused -- in your example you only had one device for mining, the CPU? The -t <cores> flag only pertains to people who are using their CPU for mining, right?
And I understood your example -- you showed that with the correct number of threads you got 1.17 MH/s and with the incorrect number of threads you got 0.00 MH/s.
My point was that: if my # of threads is incorrect, I should have a much lower hash rate than 208 MH/s and 357 MH/s (the respective averages for an HD5770 and HD5850 at the speeds I've set them at...from what I've found from other people's posts online). So I'm thinking it's not that.
But based on MiningBuddy's intuition, I think he/she is right -- it's just the case that a few hours passed when the pool didn't get that lucky with mining new blocks.