darkpandora,
Try using the GUI to re-edit and save your 6990 config. Seems like it might be exploding when it tries to load it - maybe a stray > or some other character somewhere?
Also - can you set the values you want for your 6990 with aticonfig? If the values are a bit wonky, I'd imagine AMDOverDriveCtrl might take a dive trying to set them.
SchizophreniX,
Double check your arguments. poclbm and phoenix have *VERY* different ways of defining username, password and host. Did you possibly fat finger the phoenix line? It should be something along the lines of -u
http://username:password@thepooladdress.com:8332
poclbm lets you use the --user, --pass, --server, --port method.