I've used Helicon Focus, I was not impressed with the results. I tried it again just a week ago on a snowflake photo, I thought maybe it would work ok on a flat subject but I was disappointed again.
I have heard that the latest version Photoshop has a focus blending feature. I have also heard that Helicon works better than Photoshop, oh well.
Dan
http://www.danbrownphotography.com
First, let me say this image is beautiful both from a composition and exposure standpoint. The focus stacking is just a bonus
To save you some experimenting: Photoshop's focus blending is worthless for closeups and macros unless you're only doing very small images to display on the web. It is not able to reliable select the best focus parts of each image.
Helicon Focus, CombineZP, Microsoft ICE, PTAssembler/Tufuse can all align images for a focus stack. For manual blending, I like Microsoft ICE since it will output the images as layers in Photoshop format. This makes it relatively easy (but tedious) to blend. I have a 600 image focus stacked pano (mosaic) of an Amarylis that I'm waiting for the software to get better before finishing. It's 35 frames and was taking about 8 hours to manually blend each frame. Just 7 weeks working full time could finish it I'm impressed that you were able to complete your project.
The forums at
http://www.photomacrography.net have quite a few people who are very knowlegeable about focus stacking. You may want to show your snowflake image there to get suggestions on how to tweak the settings in Helicon Focus.
p.s. Try using ICE to create a Deep Zoom of the image so we can all enjoy it full size.