Time outs start at 5th hop after 120.28.1.37

Yes, i'm using windows. US1, US2, and US3 all resolve to 208.110.68.114.

Pinging only results in request time out, but I can access the website and login without problems.

I have been using US2.ECLIPSE.COM:8337 for DGM and US1.ECLIPSEMC.COM:8337 for PPS. It's been setup that way since anonymous PPS was introduced. The only time I modified my cgminer batch file was when authenticated PPS was added.

I only noticed 8 hrs ago that my mining stopped after I saw my kill-a-watt displaying only the idle power consumption. According to my worker stats, my miners stopped submitting shares 11hrs ago. I even restarted my modem but no luck there. Tried using previous versions of cgminers (batch files weren't modified), still no go. Tried connecting to the test port at 8117, still can't connect. Tried connecting to other pools, no problem there.

My miners still cannot connect to the pool but no problem accessing the website.

Because of that block, I switched half of my miners to PPS

Already tried that. With 2.4.1, the problem persist even if I run the primary card at default core clock. With 2.3.6, all 3 6870s at 960 core work for days without problems.

Switch to Windows and you can do all these. 

Using 3 cards with Win7, there are times that the cards stop mining and everything on the desktop disappear except the background. Tried disabling the OC of the cards but the problem remained.

Went back to 2.3.6 and been running 3 days now without hiccups, except for a slight increase in stales.

1) Yes, I tried it on WinXP/Win7 32/64.
2) Yes, you have to use optimized miner for each card (ie. ufasoft for nvidia, cgminer for ati). But better to let the nividia card idle when you're not gaming if you don't have free electricity.
3) Yes, I tried this on a motherboard with an nvidia 8200 IGP. Played online games on the IGP and mined on the 6870 at the same time.
4) If you use CGMiner with intensity above 8, mouse movement might be laggy and game loading time might increase. (Its possible that you might not encounter these problem because you are using a card, not IGP.)

Anonymous PPS shares are paid after every solved block.

I don't mix different series cards in 1 rig. I didn't mention that I only have 1 rig either. 

I've tried it on WinXP 64 but only with 5xxx/6xxx cards but reverted back to 2.5 due to the performance hit. The only thing I haven't tried is the 12.4 driver.

After installing 12.4 driver without opencl, try installing 2.3 or 2.4 first then install 2.6 without removing old sdk (I did encounter the problem of cards not detected once when I did a clean install of XP and 2.6, all I did was remove 2.6 then install 2.3 and install 2.6 back over older sdk.).

I dont have 7xxx cards but 2.6 works with 32/64 WinXP, you just have to install it separately (win7 2.6 sdk will work with xp).

http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/Pages/default.aspx

Well, if you have an existing rig with an extra slot and cheap electricity, it's still worth using it. For 4xxx cards, dont use the new miners. Try older poclbm or guiminer with a CL file released before August. The enhancements that made the newer cards mine faster also degraded the performance of 4xxx cards. Last year, I had a 4350 and mined with it for several months. I think it was getting 18MH/s using the older poclbm CL file.

Download and install Rivatuner. Since it's an old utility, it cannot detect your cards. Download and run RBE. If it detects the installed Rivatuner, it will prompt you to authorize adding your cards device IDs to Rivatuner's list of supported devices.

Use Afterburner to set the core and mem clocks, disable auto loading of AB every boot. Close AB. Open Rivatuner, detect clocks and enable "Apply overclocking on Windows startup".

Your cards will now have the customized settings even after reboots.

I use this method on my 6870s with 960/134 clocks.

AB was based on Rivatuner but I don't why my mem clocks revert back to default after reboot even if I configured it to apply the modified clocks on startup. My cards also locks up my rig if I set mem between 319-415. Stable clocks are 133-318, 416-1100.

Just stop wondering and try it, it's great.

It's not that they're not interested. They just know that they will only be wasting their time and think "Why bother?".   
 

Will all these FPGA boards run fine with a Pentium III system with 1.1 USB? I think my old P3S-1.4 is still around somewhere in the basement. The CPU according to CPU-World is only 30w.

Already tried that the time I assembled the rig. Even if I disabled some of the cores (greyed out), no effect with core unlocking disabled. The system will still boot with all cores enabled.

The current bios of my motherboard disabled core unlocking. According to gigabyte's site, I have to go back to an older bios to have the feature enabled again. I'm a bit wary of going back to an older bios, they disabled the feature for a reason and I don't want to tackle any possible problems that maybe introduced by the older bios.