First, thank you to @picokernel and to @contentjunkie for the work you've done on this.

One point of clarification, though.  The more I think this through, the more confused I get.  The miner throws its work away and starts over every 3 seconds, right?  So how does it matter if the N cores are chasing 1 problem or N problems?  Either way, I think they're only going to hit one block (at most) during the interval, aren't they?  If N cores are chasing one problem, they've got N chances to solve it.  If they're chasing N problems, they've got 1 chance to solve each of them.  (N * 1) or (1 * N)  - same net result.  Not saying you're wrong, since I haven't read the code, but I'm just trying to understand.

Guess I'll have to break down and RTFM one of these days...

Last, FYI, I tried the windows compiled executable, but for some reason, I could only get it to use 1 core.  It ignored my "mining-threads" setting in config.ini and the "-t" command line argument.  Not sure if anyone else is having this problem or not.

**Update:** Clicked through to github.  Now I get it.  I hadn't understood that all cores are using the same nonce.  So the miner really only has 1 chance to solve 1 problem with the unpatched version.  Not N chances.