After considerable mucking about, I've uninstalled BOINC from the affected machine. It remains active in the three remaining (and apparently unaffected) systems.

The issue wouldn't likely have been severe enough to call for this step, if the freezing covered in another thread wasn't driving it.

https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=20407

The conversion from UD to BOINC obviously cannot be allowed to interfere with normal work. The only hardware/SW changes made during the attempted conversion were:

New hard drive cloned during regular back-up rotation.
New power supply installed (2yr pre-emptive - 1mo early)
Uninstalled old Xilinx CPLD programming SW (not current or in use)
re-install 'wcg_boinc_5.10.45_windows_intelx86.exe'.

Projects attached were FAAH and HCC through WCG. (Screensaver disabled.)

Would be happy to hear any tips from W98 users who have run into this particular suspend issue, or screen freezing issues with the BOINC agent in W98 and who have managed to deal with them more successfully. ( leggatmagmadotca )

For the record, the affected system was/is:

W98 2ED (v4.10.222A) dual boot (W2K SP4 on D:) (shell32.dll and kernel32.dll rev'd 0704)
KM400-M2 motherboard - Phoenix LTD 6.00 PG bios
AMD Sempron 2200+ (running at 1.5GHz) (tc ~ Ta+14C)
512MB RAM FSB 2x166MHz - VM user-defined as 0-750MB
Nvidia GeForce2 MX/MX 400 graphics adapter - drivers Nvidia 4.14.10.7772
Acer AL1916A display (ACR-AD52)
and NSpire optical mouse (PS2) via KVM104P switch

Further to this issue:

After some extensive work on the second W98 BOINC machine here, it is again evident that suspension is only maintained for some minutes following first detection user activity. Crunching activity resumes automatically and will not suspend on continued user activity.

In order to maintain suspension of BOINC, the only alternative available in this second W98 machine, as it was with the first, is to select snooze, repeatedly, if the use of the unaffected machine is required for other processor-intensive uses. For W98, this could be something simple as printing, opening/saving a spreadsheet/word doc, or a basic file transfer/search.

Seeing the same defective activity on two physically dissimilar machines running the same W98 2ed OS suggests that the bug is a characteristic of the BOINC revision.

This is currently 'wcg_boinc_5.10.45_windows_intelx86.exe' for these machines.

RL

Maybe this is going to be the substitute for the frequently missing ca-bundle.crt. I have a BOINC 6.2.6 alpha installed on XP and that file is in neither the BOINC, BOINC-datadir or Windows OS directory. Was is dropped as my old 5.10.45 program dir does have the file?

Well, that was quick.

The older revision still is insensitive to keyboard and mouse activity after the first innitial recognition which last roughly 3 minutes.

The program only recognizes the opening of the BOINC client window as user activity.

This revision doesn't seem to have an option for local preferences in it's GUI, so there seems to be little likelihood of confusion there. Just to be sure, the following record begins with a request to 'read local prefs file'.
The suspend activity is in response to selecting the open BOINC client window. This remains open and in the background while user operations are performed (and ignored).

08-06-23 06:42:55 AM||Suspending computation - user is active
08-06-23 06:43:35 AM||General prefs: from World Community Grid (last modified 2008-06-06 07:57:21)
08-06-23 06:43:35 AM||Host location: none
08-06-23 06:43:35 AM||General prefs: using your defaults
08-06-23 06:43:35 AM||Reading preferences override file
08-06-23 06:47:39 AM||Resuming computation
08-06-23 06:51:19 AM||Suspending computation - user is active
08-06-23 06:54:30 AM||Resuming computation
08-06-23 06:54:59 AM||Suspending computation - user is active
08-06-23 07:01:44 AM||Resuming computation
08-06-23 07:02:18 AM||Suspending computation - user is active

RL

I apologise for the confusion, but Tedi's post (and the FAQ) are wrong. The current versions of BOINC can and do support Windows 98. Windows 95 is supported only by BOINC 5.8.16. World Community Grid does not provide Windows 95 support.

BOINC 5.8.16 does use the preference override. When it says reading override file, that is what it is doing. The file will be read no matter what it contains (but cannot be altered with the advanced preferences dialog). If you created an override file with a later version of BOINC, and read it with BOINC 5.8, the results are undefined. I recommend deleting the override file.

BOINC 5.8 had a major bug relating to the user activity feature. I forget the details, but I believe the solution was to delete the override file and use the web preferences instead.

However, in this case I am disinclined to pursue it further. Our original advice to legg was to reinstall the operating system, since it clearly is no longer in a consistent state.