We need a lot more information than you gave us.

Starting with, what version of BOINC, what operating system, what projects and what you see in the tasks tab of the advanced view.

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Kathryn :o)

Which other projects, if any, are you attached to?

What do you see in the Tasks tab?

The "switch tasks every X minutes" setting is just some sort of "hint". I think the precise behavior is "every X minutes, check the tasks to see if you can switch to another". Sometimes it can't, for example because it waits for a task to save its progress to disk before suspending. Or if that task needs to get finished as soon as possible due to the deadline ("deadline trouble", it won't switch to any other task until that one is finished.

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It sounds as if you may be getting more work for your computer than it can easily handle. You may want to go to the Projects tab of BOINC manager, select certain projects and them click No New Tasks once only for each of them. After they've finished their current task they won't request any more until you click the button again.

There's only so much a computer can handle.

It sounds as if you may be getting more work for your computer than it can easily handle. You may want to go to the Projects tab of BOINC manager, select certain projects and them click No New Tasks once only for each of them. After they've finished their current task they won't request any more until you click the button again.

There's only so much a computer can handle.

The easiest to alleviate is to change the 'connect' to a default frequency of 0.1 days and set the Local Pref 'additional buffer X days' option to a more reasonable number like 4 days or less. BOINC learns and will start with NOT fetching work and tune the buffer accordingly until normality is restored. After that it will drop out of hi priority crunching and fetch work again and switch projects as per their weights.

That's good advice and works well. Some people just don't understand how to use their settings (global & local), or they abuse the settings until everything reaches an "adversarial or conflict" status.