The icon has a red dot, looks square, on top of the BOINC client icon in the system tray. No 'x' is there. It is communicating, I just uploaded 2 "ready to report" tasks successfully. It is running an application for each core (8), and the CPU time is advancing.

I do notice the little yellow windows that comes up when you hover over the systray icon that says 8 tasks running and pct complete does not come up.

I wonder what the red dot/square means? I cannot find it anywhere in documentation...

awalt,

One of these "where's the documentation" things and client version. It may depend on screen resolution but if the tray icon has a (white rimmed) red dot, the BOINC Manager GUI program (boincmgr.exe) is not connected to the core client (BOINC.exe), either local or remote. Obviously you need to check if the core client is running, but other cause can also be security software preventing connection blocking IP traffic (127.0.0.1) and use of ports 80, 443 and 31416. We have some FAQ's in the Start Here forum discussing this.

So we have, digging for the documentation, and found in the Berkeley BOINC wiki:

application_icon Icon 16px 16px Taskbar icon.

application_disconnected_icon Icon 16px 16px Taskbar icon when disconnected.

application_snooze_icon Icon 16px 16px Taskbar icon when snoozing.

Latter also acts as "Computation suspended" indicator. The surprising thing here was that if using the scheduled computing i.e. enter a from-to time it's allowed to compute, the BM task window shows "Suspended, time of day", but the tray icon does not show that. It would have been a nice feature to have a 'scheduled suspend' icon for either computing or networking, but then, some would experience this as an alert rather than a status informational.

2 cents overboard on this answer, and maybe one day I'll collect all possible icons and put them in our own FAQ ;>)