Wow, thank you adriverhoef for explaining that. I've been aborting them when the estimate is beyond the time available, cursing that the project doesn't give the 10 days that would allow them to fit comfortably with the schedules of some of my machines, and had stopped running FAAH2 altogether because I thought the partly completed tasks were not contributing useful results.

P.S.: Wouldn't it be better to divide the tasks into 10 pieces to be run independently, so that the "Long computing times with short Due date?" thread isn't necessary?

They could do that, but those 10 individual WU's would need to be processed sequentially. They are already dividing the 3 or 4 million step jobs into 100,000 step individual WU's. So depending on the job, they either take 30 or 40 WU's to complete the job. If they divided them by 10,000 step increments, they would need 300 to 400 individual WU's to complete the job. I am sure it is tricky enough to get the 30 to 40 to run in sequence without having to keep track of 300 to 400 to run in sequence.
If you only get some of the current WU done, they will design the next WU in the sequence to pick up where yours left off, (where your last trickle reported) so very little work is lost if you miss a deadline.
See below for further information fron SekeRob*
Cheers

Thank you both. Your replies have convinced me to let FAAH2 have access to my machines again, rather than wait for a tech person to come back from the year-end break to improve the scheduling behaviour.