If you are a somewhat advanced member and have made some modifications to the normal World Community Grid agent install configuration, then there are certain situations in which the screen saver may repeatedly restart, without performing any useful grid work. When this happens, the screen saver never shows the project graphics consisting of the rotating colored ball protein molecule and progress graphs as currently shown for the Human Proteome Folding project. If all of the following four conditions are true, you might experience the problem:

1. Your Windows screen saver is set to run the World Community Grid screen saver.
2. You have terminated running the grid agent before it finished downloading its first work and started actually running it. When it is running the project work, the agent window says "Primary task executing" at the bottom of the agent window. By terminated, we mean you either chose the "Exit" option when right clicking on the agent's icon in the system tray at the lower of the screen. Or, you shutdown, rebooted, or powered off your machine. Or, you terminated the agent while it was getting a project or agent code update, the most recent of which was May 7, 2005.
3. You have removed the World Community Grid agent icon from the Start-> Programs-> Startup menu or have otherwise done something which does not let the UD.EXE program stay active in the background.
4. You are running on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. It is possible that other variations of the Windows operating system may exhibit this problem, but we have not tested those yet.

We have asked the software vendor to provide a fix for this problem. In the meantime, the solution is to place a shortcut to the agent (the program file, which is usually located at:
"c:\Program Files\WorldCommunityGrid\UD.EXE" ) back into the Startup menu folder so that the program runs as needed. Otherwise, you must periodically run this program and let it remain running through an agent communication with the servers. It is especially important to do this the first time the agent communicates with the server we update the agent or project software, or if we launch a new project. We post an announcement in the Member News forum in advance of any such update. If you want to run the agent only as a screen saver, it is better to leave the agent icon in the startup folder and use the agent preferences window (checkmark icon) to set the agent to run only as a screen saver. Don't forget to click the Apply button.

For those of you who experimentally run the agent as a pre-login screen saver, if you never see the project graphics, you should let the agent run using the UD.exe file, mentioned above, to the point where it communicates results from its current work unit back to the server and starts working on a new work unit. Running the agent as a pre-login screen saver is currently not an officially supported mode of operation, per the software vendor.

Other similar problems
If your screen saver perpetually shows the icon for World Community Grid for more than 10 minutes with no project graphics, other causes may be in effect which are preventing the agent from running. Open the agent window and see if there are any messages at the bottom of the agent window, or if the agent is causing firewall pop-ups or some other alerts, which may require user response. The web page: http://wcgrid.org/cause.html lists a comprehensive set of reasons, which may have paused your agent. Another cause for somewhat similar behavior is explained here: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=1883