New to folding !

[minoukat]

I just left the Seti@home team :(, as it was too much of a slowdown for Windows. Now I switched to folding ! I added both my rigs to the team, the P3 900MHz and the K6-2 450Mhz, so there are 2 more comps folding for Overclockers.com !

[Ploaf]

Welcome to the Folding Team! :D
As for your question of running the client in the background-
You're probably better off running the text only client really. The graphical client is nice because it's simple to configure, but a number of people have noted that the client crashed when viewing some of the newer proteins. Displaying the graphical client does use some clock cycles and will slow down production, some. It doesn't slow it down a whole lot though and doesn't use any extra cycles when running in the background.
As for Folding times. I can't answer that since I haven't been paying much attention to them lately but there is a large thread with folding times for various cpu's/proteins here - http://forums.overclockers.ws/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=58254