Agreed... Unfortunatelly XMR isn't the easiest of the currencies to debug... =/

I'm sorry, just a curious guy here: 2ND?

Why do you think the payment rate is only .15%? It's because we're guinea pigs :P

Dash pool its currently running a lucky streak =P Congrats to all of you ^^ Now care to share a bit of that luck with the VTC and XMR pools? =P

I'm just a fellow miner, and I use the standard ccminer app on windows...

Well if those parameters are the correct one you should be set...

Just to confirm one thing, shouldn't the protocol go to the address as well? You know like this?

stratum+tcp://vtc.poolmining.org:3096

But then again, I understand squat of ethOS...

Well, it is legal, in the sense of the word...

I guess it's just bad luck... just 2 days ago that pool had a 10 block streak in a single day...

Could you please show us the configuration or any batch/bash script you're using to run the miner? There might be some missconfiguration...

Your "block expired" errors could be that. GPU sized jobs where being scheduled to the CPU...

Well, without Variant Difficulty enable, what it means is that you'll be getting "CPU-sized" problems, which may not be appropriate for the GPUs. But yeah, try that out for a while and then swap it according to results...

3. The website lists different ports to use for CPU/GPU mining, but my
miner uses both methods. Should I choose any specific port rather than
the other?

XMR vardiff is currently disabled, so I'd recomend you either start a CPU and a GPU instance of the miner with different ports, or just send them all to the GPU port...