Hello,
Thanks for the response, but unfortunately it doesn't help at the moment either

The credentials should be good, as I can use the GPU miners with the same credentials I reserved for the CPU only miners. I do have 4 registered workers (2 for GPU miners that work great and 2 for the CPU miners that despite constant computation have all shares rejected; except for the couple I just verified with a GPU miner in a matter of minutes).
I appreciate the suggestion also to try a different client, but I chose cgminer for the CPU mining machine since it appeared to be a reasonable option for them. They are both GNU/Linux servers that don't have graphical displays installed and have some firewall issues not worth discussing here, but in short, GUIs are out of the question. I have also tried poclbm, and while it's much slower than cgminer, it also never had shares accepted. I originally thought that was because the hashing speed was too low, but I stopped thinking that when I saw that cgminer was reporting a higher hash speed than my slowest GPU.
I'm surprised no one has run into this!
The stats of my latest run make me ill:
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$ ./cgminer -a 4way -o
http://mining.bitcoin.cz:8332 -u USER -p PASS
Summary of runtime statistics:
Started at [2011-08-12 10:51:19]
Runtime: 36 hrs : 36 mins : 24 secs
Average hashrate: 12.7 Megahash/s
Queued work requests: 10475
Share submissions: 382
Accepted shares: 0
Rejected shares: 382
Reject ratio: 100.0
Hardware errors: 0
Efficiency (accepted / queued): 0%
Utility (accepted shares / min): 0.00/min
Discarded work due to new blocks: 10415
Stale submissions discarded due to new blocks: 3
Unable to get work from server occasions: 28
Work items generated locally: 10985
Submitting work remotely delay occasions: 0
New blocks detected on network: 277