Was Kvothe's mother really Lady Lackless? (I think so).

Uhm, you mean the one that... died?
I think Meluan is Kvothe's aunt, and his mother was an older sister of Meluan's that ran off.
A. It's mentioned she was noble and ran off with Arliden
B. It is said about Meluan that she had someone she loved run off with a troupe. She hates the Edema Ruh. She believes entirely that they would steal two girls from Levinshir. Anyway. That's my take.

My first post here, after lurking for a while... I really enjoyed the book, I though it was definately an improvement on The Name of The Wind.

I just wanted to point out the evidence for Meluan being Kvothe's aunt in the song that Kvothe tells Sim and Will his father wrote about his mother, which confused the hell out of me when I first read it but now makes a lot of sense:

Dark Laurian, Arliden's wife,
Has a face like a blade of a knife
Has a voice like a prickledown burr
But can tally a sum like a moneylender.
My sweet Tally cannot cook.
But she keeps a tidy ledger-book
For all her faults I do confess
It's worth my life
To make my wife
Not tally a lot less...

The song implies that he calls his wife Tally because she's good with numbers, but the much more likely reason is because Tally is short for Netalia... furthermore, the last three lines can basically be read as "It's worth my life to make my wife Netalia Lockless". It seems likely that the real reason Kvothe's mother made his father sleep under the wagon after he made that song is not because it had a bad meter as Kvothe claims but because it gave away her identity as Netalia Lockless.