they are sitting in my account and have never been paid out.... all confirmed - no payouts.
I personally think the owners of the pool are using them as leverage on trades they're making themselves.
And you tried a manual payout? I know how you feel. A couple weeks ago, I lost 5000 eccoins at ECCHouse. First they didn't make the payouts. Then for several days they were mining a different coin using the eccoin pool's hash power. Finally they went offline. I lost about 2 days of mining, but some others lost much more.