The following are typical messages received the last 4 or 5 days. If I happen to receive a work unit it is a single one which takes 4.5 hrs to process. Then the fight begins again. It can take several hours to get a single work unit. Sometimes more than a day. This connection is shared with a phone so it is not up 24/7. This is not fun anymore.

--- - 2004-08-07 13:57:09 - Fewer active results than CPUs; requesting more work
SETI@home - 2004-08-07 13:57:09 - Requesting 345296 seconds of work
SETI@home - 2004-08-07 13:57:09 - Sending request to scheduler: http://setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi
SETI@home - 2004-08-07 13:57:18 - Scheduler RPC to http://setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi succeeded
SETI@home - 2004-08-07 13:57:18 - Message from server: No work available
SETI@home - 2004-08-07 13:57:18 - No work from project
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ - 2004-08-07
Also
14:04:14 - Sending request to scheduler: http://setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ - 2004-08-07 14:04:17 - Scheduler RPC to http://setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi failed
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ - 2004-08-07 14:04:17 - No schedulers responded
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ - 2004-08-07 14:04:17 - Deferring communication with project for 1 minutes and 0 seconds

The first indicates that a connection to Berkeley happened, and Berkeley did not have any work to hand out. The second indicates a communications failure of some kind. This is usually caused by the server being offline completely.

I'm not "really" offering an answer to this, John explained it pretty well. I'm using this thread to express my disatisfaction with dial-up and BOINC. I am seriously considering getting a new Internet access such as DSL. That way I don't have to worry about someone trying to call me and not getting through because BOINC has decided to dial-up just to be "deferred for" X number of minutes. I set my dialer to shut down the connection after 5 minutes of non-use. This does not always work since I have WinXP, ZoneAlarm, PC-cillin, etc. looking for updates whenever the PC is online. With BOINC deferring communication for 1, 2, 3 minutes, my connection will never get severed. Just a thought....

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<p>Rick A. - BOINCing right along now....</p>