Thanks for the reference... glad the tips helped someone else out! My blades have been hashing away nicely since my original post.
anyone with blades down?
As someone else has suggested (and it worked for me once):
1) Try removing all the pools, then re-entering them
2) If you have more than 1 blade, set a unique entry in the pool list with a unique worker name for each blade. Then assign each blade from the drop-down list. This way you can monitor each blade for problems.
From my own experience, set your worker/share difficulty on your pool to 1024 or 512. Share difficulties of 16 or 32 make the blades perform unreliably, in my experience.
reference:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=529093.msg6711631#msg6711631