Turned out I had a persistent bugger of an anti-malware program running. I thought I'd disabled it but it's borderline malware itself. Just uninstalled it, we'll see what happens tonight.

... and right after I posted that, I witnessed another of these events again. So I guess that malware-turned-malware-sweeper wasn't the culprit either. This time I saw cpu utilization drop to zero and firefox labelled unresponsive under resource monitor. Closing firefox for the night to see if that fixes this.

Closing firefox for the night to see if that fixes this.

Ugh, you have habit to keep browser open all the time?
With the stupid (CPU-hog) Facebook page? (especially the right user-list-vertical-banner if open uses MUCH CPU)
Avoid also to have/leave tab open that uses Flash

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)

Turns out the hard disk my OS and BOINC was on was dying, dying, dead as of yesterday. Guess we can really close the case on this one. "no finished file"... indeed :rolleyes:

Possible causes of the "Task exited with zero status but no 'finished' file" syndrome:

1. Make sure you exclude the BOINC directory and all subdirectories (or the BOINC Data directory and all subdirectories in BOINC 6 and 7) from being actively scanned by anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Only scan when you have exited BOINC.

2. Don't defrag your disk with BOINC on.

3. Don't run Scandisk with BOINC on.

<snip>

Just want to double-check: from what I read in this thread, it sounds like it's necessary to completely shut BOINC down during the above operations to avoid the error. So just using BOINC's scheduler to suspend compution at specic times of day wouldn't be enough.

If that's true, I think one solution would be to put BOINC's data directory on a hard drive of its own and not let anything but BOINC touch that drive.

Turns out the hard disk my OS and BOINC was on was dying, dying, dead as of yesterday. Guess we can really close the case on this one. "no finished file"... indeed :rolleyes:

lol! too funny

btw, that's a reason to not defrag every week... it wears out the head movement in the disk. Modern filesystems like HPFS don't fragment the way FAT used to. Unless you're creating and deleting a ton of files every day you probably don't need a weekly defrag or even a monthly defrag.

If that's true, I think one solution would be to put BOINC's data directory on a hard drive of its own and not let anything but BOINC touch that drive.

Isolating BOINC on its own disk or partition won't necessarily allow you to run BOINC during virus scans and defrags. The reason is those programs can preempt BOINC for extended periods of time in spite of the fact they aren't touching anything on BOINC's drive. When BOINC is preempted it can't communicate with the science apps and that lack of comms is what causes the "exited with no finished file".

I say those programs "can preempt BOINC" but that doesn't mean yours surely will. Different virus scanners work in different ways. Also, I would think that on an 8 core system the defragger is going to preempt BOINC a lot less than on say a single core or dual core.

IMHO if you can't tell the virus scanner to leave c:\program data\boinc alone have that work then it isn't going to leave d: alone either. With the defragger it's different, it will defrag on C: and leave d: alone.

To me the simplest and safest solution is just use a script to shutdown and restart BOINC for periodic defrag and scan.