My projects are still running, but all of the BOINC Manager screens are empty. I'm afraid to re-download it without someone telling me it's ok - I'm new and am not yet familiar with all the ins and outs. Didn't want to take the chance of wiping out all the work I've done so far. I have a project task that has run for 60 hours and I sure don't want to start that guy over again!

(I am running Windows 7)
Thanks for your help!

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BOINC consists of two main parts. One is the client (boinc.exe) and one is the graphical user interface called the manager (boincmgr.exe), or BOINC Manager. The client does all the hard work, the manager is used to give commands to the client.

These parts of BOINC need to be able to talk to each other, therefore they need to be added to the exclusion zone of your firewall, where boinc.exe and boincmgr.exe are allowed to talk to each other on TCP and UDP ports 31416. Boinc.exe needs separate access to the internet on TCP ports 80 and 443.

What you see, a BOINC Manager without anything showing, is normally happening when either:
1. The client isn't running, so check in Windows task manager that boinc.exe is running, either for your account name or processes for all users; if it isn't, exit all BOINC Managers and start just one.
2. BOINC Manager can't make contact with the client. It will say this with a pop-up window. The client will be running, but the manager will just not be able to connect to it. A reboot will usually help here, as that clears up all ports in use on the computer.

Most projects have science applications that do checkpointing, meaning that they write progress reports of where they are in a task to disk. Some don't have this (such as BURP, Renderfarm.fi and The Lattice Project), but most others do. This means that you can easily reboot the computer without losing (too) much progress.

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