Well, I owe you a beer.
If you ever find yourself in the San Francisco Bay area, just let me know. We can meet up for that beer.
My last question would be: What do these settings do, and on what occasion, if any, would I want those boxes checked?
If you hover your mouse over each one, it should provide a tooltip explaining them.
Always select the "Use Maximum Render Quality" for a final export. It takes longer, so if you are just trying to get the feel for something or timing the audio, don't bother. But for all videos you are going to show someone, you should probably select it. One thing it does is improve the scaling from HD to SD. But it is supposed to have some impact on motion as well.
Unless you are editing DV, forget the "Use Previews" selection. You do NOT want to use the previews unless you are in a big hurry - kind of the same reasons you might forgo using the maximum render quality. Your quality will likely suffer greatly from using previews. Unless you are planing to export to the same codec as the one you are using for your previews. And that isn't all that likely for most people.
As for frame blending, you should probably have done that on the sequence if you are changing frame rates. But if you are changing them and you didn't do it on the sequence, feel free to use it to smooth out your video.