The blocks to the offline wallet issue is one I've been working on a bit.  A few new changes seem to have broken a couple of things and had Eligius mining "empty" blocks a little more often then it should have been.  However, without the changes it would have been delayed on block changes completely, so, there's that.  Working on a solution and have it mostly implemented.

For background, I've setup the pool so that if it can't get a block template from one of several pool bitcoind's in a reasonable time, it will use the info it has to build a block on top of a validated previous block from one of about a dozen other bitcoinds that I have setup all over the place as part of my little private Eligius block relay network.  This way, even if something lags out the core bitcoind's used for templates, the pool isn't behind the network and miners don't lose out.  In fact, it keeps Eligius pretty quick on block changes.

In the interest of transparency, and I have noted this before, most of the pool donations end up in the same offline wallet as the one I use to do manual payouts.  The 4.5 BTC was the sum of those over some extended period, heading to a Bitpay invoice payment to our datacenter (kudos to them for accepting bitcoin payments from us, although they haven't made this a public thing yet).  The wallet software just mixes and matches coins to make a sensible transaction.  In this case it found input coins that added up to make it so no change address was required, which is generally a good thing.  Local accounting on the client in this case doesn't affect the Eligius cold wallet funds, so it doesn't really matter in the end.  I usually try to include the payments to the datacenter with the manual payouts, but they had asked me about it so I quickly knocked that out. 

Also to note, as of right now Eligius receives in donations roughly 0.0027 BTC per block, as a sum of everyone with a donation amount set.  Not much, but better than nothing.  The vast majority of donations are just people sending donations directly or mining under fun usernames that aren't bitcoin addresses.  My recent favorite is "WIZKID_YOU_WANKER_HERES_SOME_DOUGH" where they mined about 0.5 BTC worth of shares under that username.  Thanks, and thanks to everyone who does donate or has donated!

I wanted to try and sort out the little race condition that was causing the pool to mine more fail-safe blocks than it should be before doing a manual payout, but I hadn't been able to correct it completely and the queue was getting too large so I emptied the one offline wallet (the one with the 1ChAnge type address and the donations) into a manual payout to keep the queue low in the meantime.  393,375 is just about confirmed, so I'm going to do that again shortly now that I think I've got it mostly worked out.

I haven't reviewed the whole Bitcoin-Classic thing in detail just yet, however at first glance it looks like another Bitcoin XT type nonsense cooked up under a new name.  I'll investigate further later.  In the meantime, let's keep altcoin talk elsewhere.  Feel free to come to #eligius on Freenode if you like.