I liked Eligius at first, but they left a sour taste after they disabled their US server earlier today, which is the one I was using.  That wouldn't be that bad if the EU and US contributions were combined, but they're not, so I'm now stuck with 0.25 BTC on their US server, and 0.013 on their EU server.  I'm keeping faith that they will re-establish the US server soon so I can continue working towards my first BTC, but it did leave a sour first experience.  Not to mention that they had us "bank" some of our credits on yesterday's short blocks which they will pay us back on long blocks in the future, which can only happen after they re-enable the US server.

There are bound to be kinks in the beginning of any tech project, and the bottom-line question is whether you have enough faith / trust in the pool admins to get things back into shape.