I don't bother with the pools.  Too many issues.  I use mbk's boolberry-opencl to solomine and am finding blocks consistently.  The hashrate is low enough that solo mining is still the best option for me.  I get much less coins mining on a pool.  I'm also not affected by any DDOS attacks.  I did have a private pool setup but I seem to get more blocks with the solo mining using the daemon rather than pointing my miners at a pool.