1. The deadline for work varies by platform, project - even by work unit. I think the current UD deadline is about 2 or 3 weeks. The BOINC deadline is about 1 week.

2. Yes, it helps to get results sooner. But the system is resilient enough to deal with late results.

3. I don't quite follow that question. The UD agent always returns a result before getting the next work unit.

4. Yes, extra copies are sent out when work units are not received in time.

5. This depends on the project. Most projects, though, require three copies for validation.

The UD work units are good for 2 months, 3 weeks of wallclock computing (what you see in the agent) and 2 weeks of CPU time (what you see in the TaskManager).... whatever comes first makes them time out. The BOINC present standard deadline is 9 days regardless and have an in-build time out so they cant go on and on when not watching the agent.

Not really. But lost work units happen all the time - it's really not worth worrying about. Just try and kill it shortly after finishing a work unit, so you don't waste too much of your own crunching time.

As a CA, I often have to abort or abandon work units while testing issues others have reported. Believe me, I don't lose any sleep over it.

BOINC, of course, has mechanisms for aborting work properly, and you can even set it to not get new work.

If you are a UD monitor slotter, i think you can set slots not to receive work, AND the one way to sleep over it and WCG patiently waiting out the 2 months is return a result and during download of new one, kill the agent and remove the link from the auto-start folder (user and all-users ;>)

I'm pretty darn sure WCG does not wait 2 months btw. Credit is given to 'slaggers', but the batch completion needs to be done, so extra copies will be send out long before.

Anyway if you're satisfied, insert [Complete] in the header of your first post (little pencil next to title).