"leather-guy, Your results are excellent. Any tips you can share?"
Nothing too extraordinary about my learning process. . .
I scanned the several online threads at the various forums, doing a cut-and-paste of sections that seemed most informative into an Email I sent to myself and then archived in a subfolder of my Email Client. 
I read thru the latest manual, the archived Email, and the Elle tutorial (I think it was called?) several times before actually installing the program.  
I've only had the program crash once out of 20-30 run-throughs, but I always recommend saving often, just in case.

The key things that help me I've found are to;
Try it a couple of times with photos, then use that experience to guide your selection of further pictures to use.  
I found that re-sampling small photos larger seems to improve the results.
Experiment with placing points exactly on the margins, slightly outside, and then slightly inside the margin lines being selected to compare the results.
Use the 3 free-style lines to accent things like cheekbones, smile lines, Inner lip lines, broad nose bridges, etc.
Don't hesitate to back up a few steps or even scrap one entirely to start over if it seems to be going badly.
Save textures both before and after mirroring to compare later.