There is a thread on the BOINC boards that suggests there may be a problem with the client requiring libcurl3 which is not available under 16.10

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=12677#88518

I am upgrading this box at the moment but will hold off on my other one.

The trick there may be to put a copy of libcurl3 on to a usb ram stick.
If any upgrade deletes it during the cleanup process, just copy it back after the upgrade has finished.

Hasn't caused any problems with my upgrade. Richard has asked myself and the person who posted the problem for details of our setups to try and work out what the problem is. This machine has just got 2 WCG tasks running to confirm that everything works OK. When they are done I will go back to my CPDN tasks under WINE.

Panic over, looks like it was a custom build of BOINC for SETI based on 12.04 or thereabouts. BOINC built on more recent distributions and kept up to date via package manager should be fine.