I've never used Ubuntu, but:

On Mint, which is supposedly from Ubuntu, using the Cinnamon desktop, there's a Menu item in the bottom left of the screen.
On the images that I've seen of Ubuntu with KDE, there's something in that spot.

In the Menu, BOINC manager is in Administration.

There's also an option to hide items on the screen, using control h.
I don't see why BOINC should be hidden, but it's a possibility.

There is no entry in any of the application windows. the system monitor says it is sleeping, waiting for something to happen with 2 threads and 0 % use cpu as user 47.7 sec and cpu use as kernal 58.8 the parent is plazmashell and the command line is /usr/bin/boinc, it's pid is 1921 and parent pid is 1348

it is running but needs me to tell it what to do. I just need to be able to access the program window to get it attached to some projects but there is no place that shows the window interface. If I run 'boinccmd' it shows command line arguments. Is there a GUI interface so that I can attach to the various projects?

BOINC manager is the gui try running boincmgr from a terminal.

I AM UP AND RUNNING! Thanks to all for the assists and suggestions. Now the computer can do some useful work while idle