My Pi for some reason couldn't feed the miner fast enough without work returns exceeding 100ms, and that was connected to the same router as the blades. I swear I am developing only hatred for my bad luck 
How many blades/workers did you set up? Did you compile the proxy (midstate) C Extension in order to speed things up? ...
has anyone had problems with BTCGuild? I have two proxies BTCGuild is primary and Slush is secondary and after about a minute all of my miners switch over to Slush automatically. I'm running two instances of the stratum proxy on one OSX machine (mac mini).
Sorry, no idea. Been on Slush's since powering up the blade and (probably) won't be testing other pools til next week