Brilliant and higly detailed summary! Thank you very much! (Good Lord! How the snowstorm in Dun Morogh looks like!)
Some addition:
If you have a different keyboard, you can install an english keyboard setting with the Add a language option in the Control panel (
example), and switch between your native and the english one with ALT + SHIFT. Then simply press shift + 0 (with 0 I mean the key next to 1, above TAB – it's 0 on mine) and the console should appear.
Note that you can press the up and down button in the console, so you can retrieve previously entered commands if you want to experiment without too much typing.
If you want to use these settings with SweetFX (there is a thread about it here:
http://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1087) you have to set
gxMultisample to 1.