Quick question: What are folks second favorite pools to mine? I usually hit BTC Guild or BitMinter. Are there other pools that folks who have been mining a lot longer than I have prefer?
Eclipse, bitminter, and p2pool. Honestly ghash seems to run a quality service, Were it not for their excessive share of the network I would recommend them. Even with that I can't say its bad to put a small amount of hash rate onto it. Will reduce your variance a lot. For example, a mix between ghash+p2pool is probably a net gain for decentralization with low variance.
I have had good results with slush but the fees are now to high for me too recommend, and the hash rate too low to offer any offsetting benefit in terms of variance.