I have to say, I was secretly hoping you would see this :)  Thanks for the tip, that was all I needed to get the height working.

 The positioning of the fog worked out rather well, and i'm happy with it, but I just can't seem to get the shadows right. I decreased the atmospheric density to.06 so as not to obscure any shadows, and increased the atmospheric strength on the single overhead light to 2, while giving the volume color a dark gray so as to offset any glow from the increased light strenght, but still nothing.  For now I'm going to revisit the old tutorial for rays through blinds and see if I can get any new insight from a step-by-step walkthrough.