It runs for 4-5 seconds, then asks me for my user-password again.
If you supply the user-password on the command line, you won't get asked for it again:
./poclbm.py --user=whatever --pass=whatever
That's not ideal from a security point of view, perhaps someone will suggest a better way.
By the way, before poclbm I need to run bitcoind. Is there an option to have it running with the gui open?
You can use bitcoin instead of bitcoind, provided you are using a recent version of Bitcoin (0.3.15 or later) and the latest version of poclbm. This gives you the GUI, plus OpenCL mining.