I only download tasks when I think I need them.

how do you do it?

Not to speak for the OP, but it's quite easy.
You just go to the projects tab in Boinc and set the Seti project to 'no new tasks'. Then, when you want to request more (no guarantee you will get some, depending on the state of the servers) you set it back to 'allow new tasks'.

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"Learn from yesterday. Live for today. Hope for tomorrow." Albert Einstein
"With cats." kittyman

I only download tasks when I think I need them.

how do you do it?

A further observation with 2 days set as a buffer, if I download
work units that are dead lined in 3 days any number of work
units that come to more than 24 hours of work will start to run
in high priority mode.

I dont think its related to Boinc 7.

I got 40 days recently with 6.22 and settings of 2 and 3 days.

DCF 1.3

I upgraded from 6.10.60. Maybe the strangeness
started occurring after that release.

Luckily I've been running no new tasks because
of all the strangeness since 7.x.x came out.
I only download tasks when I think I need them.
I don't trust the BOINC Manager any more.

I dont think its related to Boinc 7.

I got 40 days recently with 6.22 and settings of 2 and 3 days.

DCF 1.3

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Lucky you didn't have a work request... I just tested mine with 10,000 days...
06/08/2012 23:17:29 | SETI@home | Requesting new tasks for CPU
06/08/2012 23:17:29 | SETI@home | [sched_op] CPU work request: 2591715913.38 seconds; 0.00 devices
06/08/2012 23:17:32 | SETI@home | Scheduler request completed: got 20 new tasks
06/08/2012 23:17:32 | SETI@home | [sched_op] estimated total CPU task duration: 161820 seconds

... and quickly suspended network after this, so I could bring minimum back down to 1 day without it downloading all work that Seti has on server at this time... :P

2591715913 seconds comes out as 29,996 days. About 10K days per Seti available CPU core. :)

(I reported the bug to BOINC Alpha)

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7.0.31

Noticed work units had shifted into high priority
mode for some reason. After looking around I found
that my local computing preferences had set themselves
to minimum work buffer of 100 days. Setting the work
buffer down to something reasonable the high priority
went away. Strangeness.