Uh!!! I'd love to buy such calendar!!!
But they are still too expensive for me...

My monarch died long ago ... that someone else (not BFL) supplied me with.

BFL never contacted us about firmware changes or anything like that (or even about the Monarch until LONG after they should have) so your on your own with support of newer firmware in them since I've no idea at all what might have changed and no way to test it.

Well if you can try an older version of cgminer and if an older version works and a newer one doesn't then that would relate to identification issues.
However, that won't be the cause of slowing it down, that would more be a case of it not working.

Looking at
https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/blob/master/NEWS

I'd guess maybe try a real old one about the time it was working for me ...
I was running an old one back on 19-Jan (last day my moth worked for me)  but I was using 4.6.0 (or try 4.6.1)
If either of them work OK, then the problem is something that someone changed in cgminer since then.

This was reported before (I believe by Os2sam) where they updated the firmware and never told us anything, breaking cgminer. We've lost all contact with BFL (which was very tenuous at the best of times anyway) and neither Kano nor I have any working BFL hardware any more to update the software, so there really isn't much choice I'm afraid.

Yeah there's one, very much appreciated by me, person on my pool running an S3 24/7 mining to my account.

The best thing to do with the S3 is wipe it back to factory settings (with a firmware from bitmain) then add my update:
https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer-binaries/tree/master/AntS3

His averages 0.44TH/s
Here's an accepted share rate graph of his worker over the last 12 days:

Pretty boring graph - but also pretty consistent.

They should check that all the chips are firing, no X's in the status screen.

My S3+ averages about 490GH/s, I just turned it back on as a lottery machine a few days ago.

6 S3s should be just under 3TH/s if they are configured correctly and not broken parts.

Thanks for the offer guys, but being in Australia means it would cost more to ship than the hardware itself is worth. Perhaps if you could find a document somewhere with firmware change details I could guess what modifications might be needed in the driver from it and work on one remotely.

Sorry that URL makes my eyes bleed so I can't use it.