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Should it not stay lit so I can adjust the lights location. As well, when I click say on the spotlight I have to take it more than half way down my viewport until my cursor crosshairs show up. Otherwise I get a red circle where the crosshairs should be, before I am below the half way mark in the viewport.

I am having some difficulty inferring your meaning; are you referring strictly to what happens inside Rhino's viewport, even if, say, you did not have the Maxwell plugin installed?

Because in that case, if you have your viewport set to Rendered mode, and you create a spotlight, that is just what happens; everything not lit by the spotlight is in shadow, which is pure black. The reason it's black is that by default, Rhino sets File > Properties > Rhino Options > View > Display Modes > Rendered > Lighting Scheme > Ambient Color (shortcut: right-click viewport label > Display Options) to black. It has been this way as far back as I can recall, and I assume the reason to be that there is no universally-good color to choose; whatever it is, it will always seem wrong for one discipline, and right for another.

But that has nothing to do with Maxwell, so I am not sure if it will answer your question; if not, please provide a precise set of steps I can use to reproduce what you're referring to.

JDHill, thanks for the explanation! I have not used Rhino much but I understand the logic. The reason I wanted to add light is because my scene was too dark. It turned out my shadows were turned on. Turning the shadows off solved my problem.