As it is a fork of Litecoin, the coin I'm making uses Scrypt. It's not mining from any sort of pool, I've setup the RPC user, pass and allowips so that I can use cudaminer to mine directly too the wallet using my GPU instead of my CPU. I can verify that the block reward is 10, and I shall try mining directly from the wallet too see if that makes any difference.
Glad that the second one is cleared up, I always thought that, although visible at 1 confirmation, there was a in-code function that changed the amount of confirmations for the transaction.
QUESTION 2 HAS BEEN ANSWERED!
Sending out the bounty for that question