...I see it says Win 8, have you tried the free upgrade to 8.1?

I've already stated that I'm using 8.1, but the BOINC event logs refer to it as 8. This pc came with 8 pre-installed; I "upgraded" it to 8.1 right after it arrived.

From what I've read about this type of communication problem with the BOINC agent (and its various projects), there's no clear or simple solution, and these issues all seem to be 64-bit system related. If it doesn't work, the typical end user doesn't know why and that's that. I'm not going to waste any more time or energy into troubleshooting it, since I'm not a programmer. Thanks for the input though.