Wasyoungonce, you are not a pain at all!!! And you can contact me by the way that is comfortable to you - here, in Yahoo, in other forums or by mail
As for the dithering, here is the game
When it is enabled APT makes dithering between every light exposure. It send the selected command to PHD and monitors when the distance to the guiding star will become less than the one defined in the "Dithering stability". When this happens it wait number of seconds (defined in "Settle time") and starts the next exposure. The "Timeout" is a way to define the maximum time you want to spend in dithering, after that time APT will start next exposure no matter what is the PHD state (0s means infinite timeout)
Auto canceling is feature that allows to cancel a running exposure if the distance to the guiding star becomes too big.