Sorry for posting this as a new question, but it may help others who have this same problem...

It turns out that the cause of the \"bad first tag\" and \"Can\'t parse scheduler reply\" issue was the anti-virus program NOD32.

I am using a beta version that is Windows XP SP2 Security Center aware. It seems to be adding a carriage return at the beginning of the file \"sched_reply.xml\".

I disabled IMON and had no issues connecting to the project and downloading a model.

In order to re-enable IMON, I went into advanced setup , selected boinc_gui.exe and boinc_cli.exe as exclusions to IMON protection.

Hope this helps others! :)

wow, I'm glad it worked out for you in the end, but what a bizarre thing for an anti-virus program to do! I guess some of them open & check every file that's accessed on an operating system, which could be a nightmare when running with a climate model which has hundreds of ancillary files.

> wow, I'm glad it worked out for you in the end, but what a bizarre thing for
> an anti-virus program to do! I guess some of them open & check every file
> that's accessed on an operating system, which could be a nightmare when
> running with a climate model which has hundreds of ancillary files.
>
>

Yea, I was really getting discouraged about the project so I reinstalled the 3.2 version that SETI uses and I had the exact same problem. So, I started searching the SETI boards and someone had discovered the connection with NOD32... Anyway, I'm back at CPDN and chugging away! :)

Just a note on IMON: it's the real time internet monitoring module for NOD32. The module that monitors file access on the PC is called AMON. AMON does not have this problem.

Anyway, I posted a note about this issue on the NOD32 beta forums, so hopefully it will be fixed in the future.