Parson my ignorance, but since last week I had to mine through a VM does this mean I dont have to anymore? If so how do I proceed?

I was informed that you only should have one active witness on your node computer. On all of the slaves leave the "# name of witness controlled by this node (e.g. initwitness )" blank with a

Its normal, it took me a few hours to get up and going!

I am having the same issues, I started the download from scratch because I had problems getting the downloaded blockchain to work. did yours resolve?