How is BOINC installed (single/shared/service)?
What is the command in the Launch short-cut in the AutoStart folder if any?
Is there a duplicate short-cut (the user and the all-user)?

Think if you look in Taskmanager you can see who the owner is of the BOINC.exe process.

The folders to check for the shortcuts is something like (translated from italian): C:\Documents and Settings\Twisted0n3\Menu Start\Programs\Startup

if looking at all-user causes your explorer to hang, you got other issues.... probably you need to do a clean OS reinstall.

*bump*

I'll do this next reboot. If the problem happens on the subsequent startup I'll post the contents of the recreated files here. If it doesn't, it will have to wait until a later startup -- whichever is the next such occasion when the problem happens again. The first opportunity is probably in a few hours, as there's bad weather moving this way and I'll probably shut down for a while.

It just happened again. Reboot, and Boinc Manager fails to connect to Boinc client.

Task Manager shows an HPF Rosetta task chewing up one core, so it actually started the client successfully but didn't connect.

Manually selecting Advanced, Select computer..., localhost and letting it fill in the pw field for me worked as usual.

Why does it sometimes require two tries to connect to localhost?

stdoutdae yields:


[08/01/07 22:37:20] TRACE [3436]: Event: CTRL-LOGOFF Event

2007-08-01 22:37:21 [---] Exit requested by user

To pause/resume tasks hit CTRL-C, to exit hit CTRL-BREAK
2007-08-01 22:44:26 [---] Starting BOINC client version 5.8.16 for windows_intelx86
2007-08-01 22:44:26 [---] log flags: task, file_xfer, sched_ops
2007-08-01 22:44:26 [---] Libraries: libcurl/7.16.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8a zlib/1.2.3
2007-08-01 22:44:26 [---] Data directory: C:\Program Files\BOINC
2007-08-01 22:44:27 [---] Processor: 2 AuthenticAMD AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ [x86 Family 15 Model 35 Stepping 2] [fpu tsc pae nx sse sse2 3dnow mmx]
2007-08-01 22:44:27 [---] Memory: 1022.48 MB physical, 2.31 GB virtual
2007-08-01 22:44:27 [---] Disk: 224.87 GB total, 145.19 GB free
2007-08-01 22:44:28 [World Community Grid] URL: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/; Computer ID: 223584; location: (none); project prefs: default
2007-08-01 22:44:28 [---] General prefs: from World Community Grid (last modified 1969-12-31 19:00:01)
2007-08-01 22:44:28 [---] Host location: none

To pause/resume tasks hit CTRL-C, to exit hit CTRL-BREAK
2007-08-01 22:44:28 [---] General prefs: using your defaults
2007-08-01 22:44:48 [World Community Grid] Restarting task lf058_00007_1 using hpf2 version 518

This covers from the reboot until I had it working normally again. Nothing looks especially screwy here except the timestamp on the general prefs looks like the start of the epoch or something like that, as though it were internally reset to zero, and "Host location: none". These also appear on a reboot where BOINC behaves normally however! Indeed the entire stdoutdae chunk from a normal reboot and from the just-occurred one where it failed to reconnect normally after reboot look identical up to Restarting task ... where the specific task details differ in the expected way.

The stderrdae thing has only one item since the last time this occurred: "Another instance of BOINC is running", which was false (task manager showed and shows only one each of boinc, boincmgr, and wcg_foobar; also only one boinc item is in Startup, a shortcut to Boinc Manager; and lastly, I did a normal (not "run as a service") install and didn't do anything weird to the install that could reasonably have broken anything).

System specs are mostly in the log chunk above; the only obviously salient thing missing there is that it's an XP SP2 machine. The inability to connect via loopback is very odd since the machine's TCP stack is definitely functioning normally (as evidenced by my posting this successfully).