I have heatsinks at the backs of the hcards and 3 12cm fans blowing, they shouldn't be too hot.

I use API to shut cgminer down, but i've seen cgminer hang randomly so it is possbile that the last stage kill -9 might shut it down wrong way...

Good all with API, i'll have to implement that later this week or weekend. For now i'll stick with stratum proxy and pools that work well with it (namely pools that allow manual difficulty setting for miners).