So let me understand this.. when Slushes pool shows my workers @ 0/mh for at least the last ten rounds (last 48 hours it turns out)  but my miners have been accepting hashes the whole time (like I just discovered is happening) the thinking here is to just reset my miners and hope I start getting shares for x amount of time until it stops again???

well when I reset mine they started showing on the website, luckily I caught it pretty fast. With me though they have never stopped working as such, it's just they never started working when I opened BFGminer. I'd be interested to know if someones has dropped out without them restarting the program?

I restarted for the third time now and it still doesn't show up. I'm on bfgminer 3.8.0..

That's then you lose all or a large part of your Shares during a round for no apparent reason (bug, at least hope it's just a bug).
Since Slush is nowhere to be seen and things seem to run a bit unsmooth lately (don't want to say "falling apart"), let's hope nothing worse happened to the Pool.

Concerning your question about your devices, considering the current price frenzy and the almost-impossible profitability over the next months (due to skyrocketing difficulty).... Technically yes, selling them into the frenzy on EBay right now is probably your only way to actually profit. Demand is hughe and supply is minimal (at least here in Europe) - that's how it looks right now and a perfect chance to take significant profits in cold blood.

Since your USB ASICs use not much power, however, another price rise in BTC might change that calculation (but this is entirely speculative and IMHO only valid for fast USB devices, not those old Erupters).
If you're like me and just want to mine ~1 BTC to see what happens with it in the future - you might as well take your chances and keep them until their BTC output is below a "comfort level" that you set for yourself.

Another strategy that (at least right now) seems to work is to sell older/"profitability-obsolete" devices on EBay into the frenzy and buy more modern devices straight from the manufacturer.
(I'm looking into those ~5GH/s Bi*Fury USB devices right now, for me small-profile miner those are more than sufficient)

If you're only into aquiring BTC, more experienced guys will advise to wait for a price drop and simply buy BTC. If you manage to actually buy low/sell high, that's definitely the most easy and profitable way (if you're into profit alone).

For a good calculation, I use this nifty calculator...

It did. There had been a field in each worker's record showing the "UserDiff" set for that worker (UserDiff is still mentioned in the thread subject). When setting a new worker, it was possible to either fill in the desired difficulty, or insert the hashpower of the new miner and let the pool calculate the apt difficulty.
Recently, UserDiff has been replaced by VarDiff - difficulty of accepted shares for particular worker is set dynamically by the pool, nothing has to be set manually.

That option is gone like a couple of weeks ago or so. Miners start at diff 3 I guess and are the automagically set by the pool.

The people who got a 30% loss due to workers not accounted got no fix so far. I got credits for any block but I guess a 30% if not more loss due to the non-accounted shares...

Mine seems to be working perfectly with the 64bit bfgminer on windows whereas the 32bit version wasn't registering when I tried last

Falconfly - cheers for that, i'm in a similar situation to you ideally for me I'd like to mine as much as possible and hold onto them and watch the price go up still further once it becomes not practical to mine even with ASICs, the price i paid for my chips was an investment which is a small risk compared with potential returns in a few years if the price goes up. I am also looking at alt coins such as PPcoin and occasionally mining a few just to cover a few more bases but i can't see any of them getting as big as bitcoin personally.

just under 3GH/s and I am earning around 0.00022 per block, does this sound about right?

Edit: I spoke too soon, no longer registering and dropped off itself on 64bit

Probably because many workers are no longer accounted...