Move away from the background a few feet.
 Put the main light at about a 45 degree & the fill right next to the
camera on the same side as the main.  The main should be 1 stop
brighter than the fill.  Keep the side of the face toward the camera in
shadow.

 Then, get all the details at:

http://www.msnusers.com/Asktheoleproaboutphotography/joezeltsman.msnw

Mistake No. 1

Mistake No. 2

Mistake No. 3

That's because of the way you set everything up.

Send the customer to a pro until you get it right. This requires
professional skill. Take a lighting class at a local college or ask a
pro to teach you. Pay him for his time and knowledge.

here I go again, you've started me off on my favorite rant.

problem shadows are merely a symptom of a far bigger problem, your
highlights.
remember that we photograph reflected light off the subjects, lights don't
make shadows, they only make highlights.  If you have a shadow you don't
like its because your light (and I am not using a plural here) isn't getting
any there.    putting a second light on the other side is only giving you a
second set of highlights, compounding the original problem of god awful
highlights even more.

99% of lighting has nothing to do with brand or quality of gear, it is the
size of the light source to the size of the subject.   an 18 inch metal
reflector used at a typical 3 feet is about the same as a 36 or 42 inch
brollie used at its typical distance of six feet.

I am positioning my subject almost immediately in

This is the worst possible lighting set up you can do, cross lighting, mug
shot lighting.

I am positioned head-on to the

take your flash heads, remove the brollies and aim them at the side wall, if
it ain't white then either hang a white sheet, buy a panel or two of white
styrofoam (home improvement warehouses have them in the lumber dept for
house insulation, 10 to 12 bucks each.    get another to use as a reflector.

If you can get a good exposure with one flash then use the other as a hair
light.

but first make sure you can get a good image from the one main light, what
you want to do is expose so that you get detail right down to the brightest
highlight, and detail in the shadow side too, all with one 'source' of light
(even if you need more than one head over there.)   ignore your shadows for
awhile, print for your highlights, work with the one light till you get it
spread around far enough so your shadows have detail. a rule of thumb is
that the light needs to be twice as big as the subject.

get some fabric, sports nylon, its translucent and you can hang a curtain to
shoot your lights through, or still bounce off the side wall.

Oh, and move your subject away from the background, six feet I'd recommend.

brollies and almost all traditional lighting reflect qwerty thinking, you
know how teh qwerty keyboard was invented?  100 years ago the first
typewriters where not only mechanical contraptions but built without
accurate machining.  Even beginners could type faster than the contraption
could operate, so the inventor decided to spread the keys around to slow
typists down.  and to this day we still use the damn qwerty layout.

typical portrait lighting kits are kludge fixes for problems that don't
exist anymore.  early studios used flamable fabrics and metal lights, I mean
they only had cotton, wool, linen, wood and metal to work with, they had
slow film and slow lenses.  they needed to get every bit of light they could
generate into the smallest spaces, the space of the face, head and shoulders
etc.  thats why they used spot lights, parabolic reflectors.  the invention
of flash meant they could move those lights back to light larger areas, and
use a slightly larger brollie, but they were still focusing as much of the
flash output towards the subject to get as much of it aimed there.   today
you can get mono heads with more power than an entire four flash head power
pack could blast in total for less money than what a single head cost,  we
don't have to worry (as much) as the pioneers about the heat from 2,000
watts of light bulb in a small metal can, we have heat resistant plastics
now, we have a flash that can light up a white tent and blast through and
offer a soft light as lovely as any twilight.

This reply is echoed to the z-prophoto mailing list at yahoogroups where I
rant frequently about crosslighting and all the evil it does.