Is there a minimum time to be mining a pool to have any results? For example if mining with Deepbit is there a minimum time one must run cgminer to have anything added to their Deepbit account balance?
Deepbit allows PPS (pay per share) or Prop (proportional) mining. Under PPS, you get credited for each share you mine. Under Prop, you get credited after the pool finds a block, with the 25 BTC split proportionally among the miners based on how many shares they have. Since Deepbit has 1% of the total hashrate (according to Blockchain.info), on average it will take 100 * 10 min = 16 hours to find a block, though I stress this is only an average and variance can be very high. So if you choose Prop, you'll get paid every 16 hours, on average.