Since it's a Pentium 4 it has just one physical core, so it won't hurt much if you limit BOINC to 50% of the CPUs for this machine.

I agree: limiting BOINC to 50% of (virtual) CPUs is the sensible way to go.

Frankly, I'm not certain how many cores I have. I don't have a lot of memory on the machine 512MB?

I'd suggest, that you unhide your computers in your Rosetta@Home Preferences, than we can tell you that and we won't need to guess so much.

If BOINC hit the configured memory limit, it would put a task on hold as you describe and it may not decide to start other tasks when it has already started one that didn't have enough memory to run.

For a machine that is short of memory, I'd suggest adding a project that requires less memory to the mix. That way the machine can run a Rosetta task (it sounds like at least one has enough memory to keep running), along with one or more tasks from the other project.

Many of the subprojects of WCG have much lower memory requirements. The BOINC Manager monitors memory usage and as it detects memory usage that exceeds the configured value, it suspends a task. If other tasks are available that have lower memory requirements, it will run them and take care of getting enough new work to keep the machine busy.

Since your computers are hidden, we can only guess, but maybe you have not enough RAM?

How many CPU cores do you have/use and how much RAM does the machine have? How much of it do you allow BOINC to use?

Are you running other BOINC projects as well? Or is Rosetta the only tasks your machine has? BOINC does not necessarily run the resource allocations the way a person would. It balances a number of objectives to determine which tasks would be best to run at any given time. When you delete a task from your machine, it changes the information the BOINC Manager is using to decide what to run next. In some cases, that might cause it to run another Rosetta task immediately, other times, perhaps not.

Does your BOINC configuration allow more active CPUs than you are seeing remain active? Or is your concern about which tasks the active CPUs are working on?

I've noticed that my computer functions MUCH slower ever since the 3.31. version was rolled out. A lot of disk thrashing. Has anyone else experienced this?

Any chance some anti-virus software has stepped in during that time and "corrected" the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file? You might jot down the change date/time when it connects and works, and then the file should not be modified after that.

You may want to follow the advice given in the last post of this thread at the BOINC forum. It is about a user of Windows XP SP3 getting "The password you have provided is incorrect ..." message in BOINC Manager.

The suggested remedy is to search your computer for the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file (it may be in a hidden folder), open it through Notepad and change the default 32 character password to something shorter. However I would suggest making a copy of the file before you make any changes in case you need to restore the previous version.

It could be a problem with your gui_rpc_auth.cfg file, which is used to store a password for remote management of BOINC clients. Do you monitor BOINC on remote computers, or do you log in directly to the computer that has BOINC installed?

You are seeing the message in the messages tab of the BOINC Manager?? Or on the website's message boards?

For whatever it's worth I've begun to see the same thing, but only on one of my machines. I'll try to keep track of what WUs are causing the probelem

I've been checking and there is no pattern that I can tell. Different WUs with not common name.

For whatever it's worth I've begun to see the same thing, but only on one of my machines. I'll try to keep track of what WUs are causing the probelem