I don't see how answering your questions with detailed responses is non sequitur. 

It also has to do with the amount of bots being used... A lot of bots use a "stop-loss" system where if they see the trend is going down, they will sell everything. So you get tons of bots selling and crashing the market.

Is bitminter any better than Guiminer?

Hi... My name is AverageAlien.... I here for BTC and B#$%^s... And I'm all out of B#$%^s

Currently I am using guiminer: http://guiminer.org/
I found that it really takes forever to get any bitcoins at all from mining them yourself with only one halfway decent GPU. Instead I have set up an account with slush's pool ( https://mining.bitcoin.cz/ ) and inputted the name of my "worker" and it's password into guiminer. The GPU I am using is a Saphire Radeon 6850HD and I am averaging about 140Mhash/sec (this is not the full capability of the GPU, I have it limited to keep the heat down).

All of this yeilds me about 0.01 BTC every 2 days or so. Yeah, I'm probably paying more in electricity to run it. I am currently working on modifying the chrome bot posted here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67591.0 so it can do short trades while I am at work. This way I may be able to make more money trading, while I also mine.

Another newb reporting in! Howdy!