Well, depends on a few things.
Personaly, I use a lot of real-time effects, but I use them in an backward, hardware kinda way. I set up buses and put each effect on a seprate bus and use a bus envelope to control the "send", like on a mixer. It seems to be more processor friendly that way. Mind you, it involves a lot of rendering if ever you have to "hand off" your project with track seperation to someone who doesn't match your setup. Dig?
My friend, who's like a genius at making Acid sound like Pro-tools, prefers to make a copy of the track he wants to effect, opens it in Soundforge, and then adds it to the project. Which is fine if you have the ram and processors, but then, we're both running PIII at under 600 mhz of processor! But doing a "save as" is really nice when it comes to being able to go back to an earlier mix and fix that annoying snare echo...
But the "save as" method has a hitch: you need enough real estate on your drive.
For mixing though, it's great: I keep creating new Vegas files for every mixdown, into a seperate folder. So folder "Remix 1.0" contains all the effected tracks and the Vegas file; then "Remix 1.2"...etc So when your buddy you gave the cdr to last week calls and says: "it's genius! don't change a thing!", you can easily go back and see.

My 2 cents.

I'm reading Jay Rose's book right now but what I was after the feel of was this: If one persons is doing a complete production alone do they have a mixing then mastering mind set or is there a unified smoothe work flow?

You're looking for answers to questions best left unanswered. Er, that is, in my opinion.

I say that because I am like you - a one man band(at least for recording). I've had years of theory, read many articles and had many teachers. And I'm only 30 - which is a testament to the extreme wealth of info available out there. What I've taken from all of it is this: do what works for you and pleases your ear. From the books and articles you'll get all of the tips, techniques and knowledge to back it up. Every great engineer reaches greatness by experimenting. You must try everything you do in every different way possible. In the world of hardware audio we do this to see what will happen sonically. When we bring that world into the PC world we add another factor you are well familiar with, the CPU usage factor. These experiments will allow you to learn which setups work best for your situation.

Another great rule is the one about polishing terds. The better your source - the better your take will be. IE you can't fix a crap vocal with AutoTune and have it sound like it wasn't fixed in AutoTune. You can however make a great vocal track even better with a plugin like AutoTune. In the audio world this concept is magnified. Always get the best possible performance and sound to "tape". The less you have to do in post the less CPU you'll use and the less artificial your work will sound.

I have no gold records, no credits on any albums, not squat. But what I do have is lots of hours in my studio making music on a pc, frustration free. It's the greatest freedom to be able to create such works all by myself in such short amounts of time. Dive in and have fun man!

*a
www.limitedwave.com