Just wanted to report that I have been having problems with BOINC 4.09 on Windows XP Home SP 2.

After installing the client, I noticed some really strange behaviour in conjunction with climateprediction.net.

The screen saver would be all black, or the globe would disappear and reapper, and flicker between colored and all white.

Plus if I ran the BOINC in foreground mode (I usually run it as a screen saver), it would hang and use 50% CPU while hadsm***.exe or whatever would use 50% CPU as well. I poked around and found that while this was going on, BOINC was apparently in an infinite loop that constantly was rewriting client_state.xml

I finally gave up on it and reverted to BOINC 4.05 and it seems to be behaving now.

Unfortunately, through all of this trouble shooting, I ended up reseting my work for climateprediction and lost 128 hours of work. :(

In case it matters, I\'m running a P4 HT 3GHz with 1GB RAM with a Radeon 9800 Pro video card.

This is not an answer, but more details...

I just switched to BOINC 4.09, am running WinXP Pro, SP2. CPU is a 3.2GHz P4 HT. I didn't get to see the screensaver part -- when I turned the monitor on this morning, the screen was black, the machine unresponsive to mouse wiggles. I was able to do a Ctl-Alt-Del to get control, and rebooted. On reboot, BOINC started up but when I clicked the icon in the systray, nothing happened. I checked running processes, saw hadsm3um_4.03_w (50%), hadsm3_4.03_win (0%), boinc_gui (12%). My virus scanner was taking up the remaining time scanning client_state.xml as it was being rewritten constantly.

I looked at client_state.xml and there is an odd line in it which may be a symptom. Here are the first few lines in the section up to the odd one:

{project}
{master_url}http://climateprediction.net/{/master_url}
{project_name}climateprediction.net{/project_name}
{share_size}0.000000{/share_size}
{size}-7307860.000000{/size}

I noticed that in properly working installations, the "size" is 0.000000. I'm going to try just changing that one line to see what happens.

OK, more details. Setting size to zero didn't help. I also noticed there was NO Seti process running as it had run out of work, and S@H isn't responding. Going to try reinstalling 4.05.

Also, I'm running 4.09 on three other machines with no problem. One is a P4 (non-HT) and two are PIII duals.

-------
Edit-- Back up and running with 4.05...

>Unfortunately, through all of this trouble shooting, I ended up reseting my
>work for climateprediction and lost 128 hours of work. :(
There should have been no reason to do a project reset, and BOINC doesn't automatically do one unless you change the major version of the core client (BOINC 3.x -> 4.x)

>In case it matters, I'm running a P4 HT 3GHz with 1GB RAM with a Radeon 9800
>Pro video card.
I also have BOINC 4.09 on a Windows XP SP2 machine with Radeon 9200SE, and I get no screen flickering, and no problems processing in idle mode (98+% CPU).

>I looked at client_state.xml and there is an odd line in it which may be a
>symptom. Here are the first few lines in the section up to the odd one:
>{project}
>{master_url}http://climateprediction.net/{/master_url}
>{project_name}climateprediction.net{/project_name}
>{share_size}0.000000{/share_size}
>{size}-7307860.000000{/size}
>I noticed that in properly working installations, the "size" is 0.000000. I'm
>going to try just changing that one line to see what happens.
I also have a "<share_size>0.000000</share_size>" line in my client_state.xml and all's fine.

>I checked running processes, saw hadsm3um_4.03_w (50%), hadsm3_4.03_win (0%),
> boinc_gui (12%).
The GUI is using WAY too much CPU time. The "disk" tab is known to use some extra CPU, but still, it's strange.

I would suggest updating your project preferences ( http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/prefs.php?subset=global and http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/prefs.php?subset=project ), reinstalling BOINC 4.09, running the benchmarks, and doing a project update for all the attached projects on the machine.

My guess is the problem has nothing to do with you hardware or OS.

Are there any suspect messages listed in the messages tab of the boinc_gui application?

>
> I would suggest updating your project preferences (
> http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/prefs.php?subset=global and
> http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/prefs.php?subset=project ),
> reinstalling BOINC 4.09, running the benchmarks, and doing a project update
> for all the attached projects on the machine.
>
> My guess is the problem has nothing to do with you hardware or OS.
>
> Are there any suspect messages listed in the messages tab of the boinc_gui
> application?
>
>
Further info: This machine was attached to CPDN, Seti@Home, and Predictor. Predictor is obviously not giving any work lately, and Seti had run out. There was only one CPDN WU on this HT machine. So, since things were working again under 4.05, I could see that Seti had stopped giving me work because of the client version. I again tried upgrading to 4.09 (completely shutting BOINC down before upgrading), but, again, it got into this state (and it was NOT running the benchmarks).

I then tried this -- I backed off again to 4.05, had it running again, then attached to LHC@home and got some work. I upgraded again to 4.09 and everything is now working. Could it have something to do with only having work for one of two processors?

How come I can't get another WU from CPDN? So far, out of four machines, two being duals, one being HT, and one being a single, only one of the duals has two WU's from CPDN. Prefs are the same. (I know, a different problem.)

As a follow-up, I just installed BOINC 4.12 and it *seems* to be behaving OK now...