Same as I was thinking. I used to build myself but much easier just to pull between projects from http://builder.blender.org/download/
hi, I’ve updated the first post a little. 
I cannot edit poll choices once set & I didn’t think of buildbot when I started this.
but as it was out of interest & just to get an idea of what users were doing, I think it’s been quite good & not really unexpected results.
So for interest sake I did a summary.
As best as I can tell/guess/estimate from the poll results I will sum it up by saying:
On the BA forum about half the users use official Blender, the other half is fairly evenly distributed between people who build themselves, use graphicall test builds or use buildbot svn builds
thanks for the participation.
Official for compatible blends
Buildbot as well.
Always official builds. I don’t trust mingw builds, specially for animations in cycles. The problem is that cycles in windows is very sloooow…
I was building my own, but life’s been getting in the way, so of late I’ve been using the Irie-Shinsuke PPA updates… they’re pretty frequent and for my purposes they’ve been more than frequent enough.
- Buildbot
- graphicall
Official? Never. Development is running fast these days.
I use official only when i work with other people, so blends exchanged do not get some potential additional data (that can be introduced in a svn version but are not in stable release) that could lead into incompatibilty.
Every other time i work with buildbot version that i download once a week usually (unless there a feature or bugfix that interest me that ended into svn, leading me to download a new build nearly daily :D) .
Graphicall for vanilla trunk builds (for doing things like BGE work), and MingW from the buildbot (for Cycles).
My tendency is to try to not use the buildbot too often because the server running that page is over 10x slower than Graphicall’s (my recent downloads rip at nearly a megabyte per-second on Graphicall vs. 5-100 kilobytes per-second on the buildbot page).
To note, my connection is pretty fast by American standards (despite the fact we still lag behind Europe and Japan).