Dave,
Everyone here is glad to help those who do study and are trying to learn.
We don't have a problem answering a few questions as long as you working to learn.
There can be more than one problem of using too much bleach, the bleach is basic (opposite of an acid) it will turn some of your HCl into salt sodium chloride NaCl, the bleach sodium hypochlorite is made basic with sodium hydroxide NaOH, to keep the chlorine in solution, when you mix it with HCl acid some of the acid is consumed, neutralized by the sodium hydroxide in solution, as the acid converts the hypochlorite to chlorine gas, the bleach being mostly water (over 90%) dilutes this solution keeping most of the salt NaCl dissolved, until you go to heat and or evaporate solution, where you can begin to have much the sodium metal salt form a white precipitant.
It is possible that you can use so much bleach that you basically, destroy all of the HCl acid and actually just make a basic hypochlorite and salt solution in water.
Heat will drive off the chlorine gas, but can also concentrate solution, so if you have to add much heat you may want to dilute it afterwards to redissolve the salts.
You can test to see if your solution still contains chlorine, heat it until vapors come off of your solution, fill the cap off of a bottle of ammonia about half full (the ammonia will have a clear fumes you can smell), hold the capful of ammonia in the path of the fumes leaving your heated solution, let the two fumes mix, if the clear fumes from both mixtures form a white cloud of fumes when mixed, it proves chlorine gas in your solution, the white cloud is made when clear chlorine fumes and the clear ammonia fumes combine to form the white cloud of ammonium chloride gas.
The gold from cups, plates and dishes is normally very thin (like gold with other objects it can look like a lot more than there is, sometimes you can hold the glass up to the sun and see through the gold plating which sometimes looks green, it takes quite a bit of glassware to get much gold, basically what I am trying to say is you may not have as much gold as you think, sometimes with very little gold in solution, you can miss the small amount of fine brown powder even after it precipitates, I do not now how much glassware you processed, or how much gold you may or may not have in solution.
Have you done a stannous chloride test prior to adding SMB?
This can be an indicator of not only gold in solution, but also if the gold can easily be reduced with a chemical precipitant like SMB, too much oxidizer the gold will not easily be reduced, or can easily redissolve again when trying, sometimes you can watch the gold dissolve even in the stannous chloride test if the oxidizer is still there and not terribly strong,..
