A couple of hours this afternoon in the company of my scanner and Vuescan software; and at the end of the session I had a much better idea of how it all worked. Sadly, my test negative would not sit flat in the holder, with the inevitable lack of crispness; but that will be resolved once I have the custom holder which is already on its way to me.
Even so, the end result looked not too bad.
I was especially pleased at the lack of flare; given that this was taken almost directly at the sun (actually in the top left of the photo). A big improvement over my first film which was taken with the haze covered lens that came with the camera.
I particularly liked how you can set Vuescan to scan at the maximum resolution that your scanner can handle, and then set file reduction options on output that make the resulting file more manageable (10MB rather than 90MB if you use a 3x reduction). More to learn, but I am starting to get the hang of it.