It looks as if I need to do some learning about the flags etc. unfortunately no tome at present. I did note that when the system drops to 1 cpu , if i suspend the working task (always milky way) it starts 4 new tasks or picke up and continues previous work units on all 4 and keeps on all 4 when i unsuspend the task that i stopped.

I believe that others have said that the current MilkyWay application is multithreaded, using all four cores for a single task. If so, it should show something about (mt) in the application column in BOINC Manager, and tell you how many cores are being used in the Status column when Milkyway is running.

Apart from that, Boinc only shows you haw many tasks are running - use operating system tools like Task Manager or third-party utilities to check CPU usage.

Free memory is about 77% I reloaded the seti client and for the present I have 4 cpu's running. now to see why this vista machine is only getting about 100 a day. my XP machine gets at least 500 a day.

The logging flags that have to do with how BOINC decides what to do might be helpful in troubleshooting. There is a full listing of them here. With the right ones enabled you would be ableto go back through the history and see when things started going wonky. I would think <cpu_sched>, <cpu_sched_debug>, <sched_op_debug>, and/or <state_debug>.

Unfortunately, the logging flags don't work restrospectively - they only control what is logged, from the point where they are enabled, going forwards.

If the problems are ongoing, they can be a great help in analysing what's going on each time a problem - especially, any repeat of the earlier problems - happens from here on, but you won't see any more about the past than you can see already.

Speaking of which, the message/event log in BOINC Manager only displays events since the last time the BOINC core client was restarted. But there are files, stdoutdae.txt and stdoutdae.old, in your BOINC data directory which hold old messages going back before the last restart - up to 2MB by default, which for a standard installation can reach back several weeks or months. That may be enough to help you track things down. But if you need to enable the extra flags HAL9000 suggested, some - especially the _debug ones - are very verbose, and you would probably need to increase the size of the log files. Instruction for doing that are in the same listing HAL linked.

Unfortunately I knew what I meant, but it didn't all come out right. EBKAC it would seem. lol Good thing you pointed that out.
I had meant once they were enabled and BOINC restarted that once the behavior was occurring again that it could be scrolled back through to hopefully find the cause.
With the standard limit of 2MB like you mentioned it could need increased with the <max_stdout_file_size> option. If 2MB wasn't enough I would hope something like 10MB would be enough.

Does it give you an error code?

Is this puter attached to a Proxy?

Then it won't be able to connect until you define the proxie's address in "Extras", "Options", "HTTP-Proxy".

That's what I had. And keep having, because I always forget :-D

:-)= Greybeard

Your acct shows 37 WUs, of wich 35 are completed or pending and 2 due the 8th of Aug, are you trying to attach a new computer or is this one having the problems?