I would suggest you avoid epools as well. From what I have heard that pool op is not responsible as can be seen with his DGC and WDC pool.

I would suggest using arg.scryptmining.com

Some of my mining stats:

PAID SHARES
Your valid: 198920
Invalid: 687

= 0.345% orphan rate.

While it is still in the zeros, it should drop significantly and approach zero as the difficulty stabilizes.

My reject rate is less than 0.1% on http://arg.scryptmining.com .... no complaints here

nah, you generally have perfectly valid shares for orphan blocks just like any other (after all its not an orphan until you've solved it and tried to submit it).  Most sites I've seen don't really ever distinguish or list shares lost due to orphans (if they are in fact lost, and not just applied to another block).  Invalids generally line up with actual rejected shares in your client, orphan block or not.

4.7%

http://arg.epools.org is fine, the gui is way faster for me than http://arg.scryptmining.com

Hey now, while it may be a running joke among some of us that a few of my sites load slower than molasses, its thankfully got no impact on mining
(and a total re-write of the interface is in progress).  

While 'epools is fine' is accurate, having a huge portion of the hashrate isn't so 'fine'.  

Earlier in the week, arg.scryptmining.com had 5 times the has that epools did, way over 50%, I was the only miner on epools for like 20hrs at one stage, I mine and check both pools often, epools has only picked up in the last day or so. Both are guilty of sitting over 50% this week.

I noticed that multipool.in have added stratum+tcp://pool1.us.multipool.in:3346 for ARG so you don't have to participate in the bouncing. This is a good thing.

receiving should be within minutes, however it may take a day before you are entitled to receive a coin, you have to earn p2pool shares first, then the pool has to actually find a block. I wouldn't recommend p2pool if you are not familiar with how it works, you are liable to receive nothing if you don't do it correctly. eg. you must use your own wallet not Cryptsy.