cgminer hands down. Use it for BTC and LTC.
Bitminter has an interesting java app.

Kind of a pain. I had an answer to a cgminer problem and couldn't post. I felt like I could finally contribute to the community and not be a leech and nope - no reply button

I had a similar issue with cgminer a few days ago and we fixed it. I had done a complete install of win8 and installed the AMD 13.3 drivers. Ran cgminer and 'has stopped working'. I tried to downgrade to 13.1 but couldn't get the drivers clean. I read about ccleaner, drive sweeper, atiman and all the other stuff. I was actually ready to kill my win8 install and start over. I even had my cd in the drive but the boot up missed the drive and opened win8 again. So I tried one last time and...still nothing. I Google amd support. Called them and had someone on the line in a few minutes.

We got it to work in 5 minutes.
We uninstalled all the ati software off the system but stuff still gets left behind.
He had me Google Driver Cleaner Pro 1.5 - he said the site had a ton of crap links and to be careful. We downloaded the app, installed it and ran it. Once we ran it we said to remove all aticcc from the system. We rebooted and installed the ati 13.1 drivers and fired up cgminer. I was waiting for the popup to tell me it stopped working but to my surprise it worked. Thumbs up to AMD support.

Just keep going - computers are all a pain in the backside. You only learn when stuff is broken.

Time will tell. There is only x amount to be mined and it will get harder. Pure economics would say it would go up but what if other currencies come into play and are easily integrated with say PayPal and Google Wallet. Then you might have an issue. Interesting topic.

I'm using:
cgminer 3.1
wemineltc.com for Litecoin - No Fees, but can pay donations.
btcguild.com for Bitcoins - you need to do the PPLNS now since PPS is being highly discouraged with a 7.5% fee.