Vista and World Community Grid

I haven’t been able to get the World Community Grid (WCG) client (United Devices UD.EXE) to run well on my Vista machine. It has been running for awhile then giving me messages like “Unable to process Task data. Backing-off.”

I have Googled but not found a solution. Then today I went directly to the World Community Grid forum, it seems the forum is not indexed by Google for some strange reason.
Anyway I after reading the forum it seems to be a security issue when running on Vista.

Two solutions that seem to be working well:

1) Change security settings for C:\Program Files\World Community Grid (or wherever you installed) so that the group USERS have Full Control.

2) This I have not tried myself but is confirmed by many forum postings: Try to install outside C:\Program Files, e.g. C:\WCG, or even on a different partition than your
system, i.e. not on C:

I also tried running the WCG client (UD.EXE) using the Run as administrator option in Vista (right click the program icon and select Run as administrator). It seems to be working even if I for some reason at first got the logon screen in WCG client. This will not work if you have WCG run at startup.

You would think this problem/solution is something that should be
1) Hilited on the WCG homepage (at least the download section)
2) Fixed in the client or install program

By the way – If you’re not already running WCG, why not start today. Let your computer help solve world problems while you don’t use it yourself, e.g. when you’re on your coffee break.
I recieved this email the other day, this is truly great stuff!

World Community Grid is pleased to announce that the Help Defeat Cancer (HDC) project is finished. The last work units have been sent out and when the final results are returned, the project will come to an end. This project, which launched on July 20, 2006, will have run for just over 9 months by the time the last results are returned. During this time 88,000 members will have donated 2,900 years of computer time on 138,000 different computers. This is a significant contribution to cancer research.

3 comments

  1. i thank you, too (had the same problem with vista home premium and now it runs –> user has full rights on c:\program files\world grid computing)…but now i’ll try bionic, because of john’s posting^^

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