even though I have changed my preferences to:
Keep enough work on disk to last between 0 and 0 days
On multiprocessors, use at most 1 processors

my dual Xeon (HT enabled) keeps downloading WU's as soon as the number of WU in the queue drops under 4 with the following entries in the stdout.txt:
---: Fewer active results than CPUs; requesting more work
SETI@home: Requesting 1.000000 seconds of work

is there a way to drain the queue without destroying the assigned WU's??

Till a better solution is implemented, one way that should work is increasing the disk-space-limits. If "Leave at least" is larger than your free space you will continue asking, but will not download more work.

The reason that 0 to 0 does not work is to fix a multi proocessor bug. If a reasonable amount of time is set for the queue, and you have a slow multi processor computer (I have 2 dual 200Mhz machines in my mix) one of the CPUs is constantly starved unless a notice of an idle CPU is sent to the server. This notice is sent by incrementing the work time request to 1 second from 0 seconds. As you can see if a single processor requests 0 seconds with an idle CPU, the time is incremented to 1 second, and a WU is delivered.
jm7

> Ingleside:
> Till a better solution is implemented, one way that should work is increasing
> the disk-space-limits. If "Leave at least" is larger than your free space you
> will continue asking, but will not download more work.
>

"SETI@home: Message from server: No work available (there was work but you don't have enough disk space allocated)"
"SETI@home: No work from project"

the disk-space trick works
thanks :D