Screensaver fail on windows 7 home 64-bit using 6.12.34 (x64) client

Message boards : Questions and problems : Screensaver fail on windows 7 home 64-bit using 6.12.34 (x64) client
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Mr.B

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Joined: 30 Aug 11
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United States
Message 40205 - Posted: 16 Sep 2011, 10:08:57 UTC

Greetings. I have installed BOINC manager on several 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium machines and am getting complaints when other users log in. If anyone but the administrative account that installed BOINC manager 6.12.34 (x64) logs in, they get odd semi-blank dialog boxes when they try to "personalize" their windows 7 desktop and BOINC screensaver. Eventually they get the actual BOINC screensaver dialog box, but the sliders for the values that can be set don't take effect and cause more semi-blank dialog boxes when trying to accept the changes or just exiting the settings window. Are others encountering this and are there any solutions so that I can avoid having to uninstall BOINC?

I installed BOINC Manager with PAE enabled to run as a service, screensaver enabled and not allow users to control it (the manager). I wouldn't expect a user to have issues with choosing the BOINC screensaver and changing it's settings this way, but they do. They also get errors from the BOINC icon on the taskbar on login which also seems pointless. They should be able to open up the manager and see projects and stats if they are curious from the taskbar even if they are restricted from changing project related settings by the selection made during install.
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Mr.B

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United States
Message 40206 - Posted: 16 Sep 2011, 10:11:30 UTC

The same buggy behavior existed with the prior version, 6.12.33 (x64).
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Profile Jord
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Netherlands
Message 40207 - Posted: 16 Sep 2011, 11:53:36 UTC - in response to Message 40205.  

and not allow users to control it (the manager).

You misunderstand that option. The "Allow all users on this computer to control BOINC" doesn't mean they can control BOINC Manager, it means that they can run BOINC Manager and use it to control BOINC. BOINC Manager is only a graphical user interface used to give easy commands to the underlying client.

When you do not have it checked, your other users cannot use BOINC Manager to control BOINC. They cannot control any aspect of BOINC, including the screen saver.


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at00955

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Joined: 19 Oct 11
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Austria
Message 40720 - Posted: 19 Oct 2011, 18:07:13 UTC - in response to Message 40207.  

I recently installed boinc 6.10.58 on Windows7 Home Premium edition, and got a similar behaviour. The root cause seems to be that all Win7 Home editions do not support local user groups.
Boinc security relies on three user groups, boinc_admins, boinc_users, and boinc_projects. These names seem to be hard-coded, at least I've never seen an option to change these.
I tried the work-around of giving all users read/search/execute rights on the BOINC directory, but that also failed. A non-admin user gets an error message like
You are not allowed to control BOINC. Ask an administrator to add you to group "boinc_users".
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Profile Jord
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Message 40721 - Posted: 19 Oct 2011, 18:15:37 UTC - in response to Message 40720.  

Why not add them then? Yes, it's a bug that the Windows installer does not seem possible to add these user groups correctly on Windows Home and Basic versions (these OSes miss the group policy editor).
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Message boards : Questions and problems : Screensaver fail on windows 7 home 64-bit using 6.12.34 (x64) client

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