How does the "failover" setting in cgminer work? I have been messing with a p2pool which I like (no fee) but has latency about every week causing the miner to stop mining altogether. I would like to employ some kind of failover strategy so that the miner will mine somewhere else if unable to connect to this free p2pool, but I would like to be mining on the primary pool as often as possible.

I have tried looking at the multipool settings, but they weren't very informative in terms of what happens when. If I set failover does that mean that it will only connect to the second if it can't connect to the first? If not, is there any way to set up cgminer this way?
Yes, the failover setting will tell cgminer to mine on a secondary pool when the first pool is unavailable. 
Run cgminer with the following:


  cgminer.exe --scrypt -o http://p2pool.org:9327 -u username -p password
  --failover-only -o http://backuppool.org -u username -p password


This example mines LTC  at p2pool and will mine at another pool of your choice when p2pool is unavailable.