I noticed a error message in red font and was wondering what it meant:

Can't rename current state file to previous state file; Access is denied (0x5).

I tried google and the (unofficial) Boinc wiki without success. My work units appear to still be crunching, so I'm not sure if I should be concerned or not. Thanks for any information.

If you are allowing a virus scan to run, make sure it doesn't run in the BOINC folder. The error is probably because something else has locked the client_state.xml / client_state_prev.xml file(s) down, as it is being written to. This could be BOINC, but it could also be any other process, such as a virus scan, that locks the file while it scans it.

I am assuming your Windows account has write permissions to the hard drive.

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800,000 writes a day is what I wrote, but I haven't been able to either confirm or deny whether that's the case.

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I saw the message in 5.8.0 and 5.8.1 where I hadn't seen it in the versions of 5.7.x that I tested or in any of the stable releases from the 5.2.x or the 5.4.x lines. I've used the same AV software pretty much the entire time (definitely since 5.4).

I had an email conversation going with Rom and David A. about it. I'll go ahead and send a message to them letting them know that it's showing up again for another user.

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Kathryn :o)

I wonder why the renaming doesn't retry in that case, the same way boinc_fopen does. It's known that on Windows programs lock files briefly.

I just got an email back from David A.

boinc_rename() retries 5 times with a random 0..1 delay in between.
Average total delay 2.5 sec, no min delay.
Maybe there were cases where the file was locked the whole time.

I changed this so that it always retries for at least 5 sec.
If this doesn't fix it, we can up it a few seconds.

-- David

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Kathryn :o)

I noticed a error message in red font and was wondering what it meant:

Can't rename current state file to previous state file; Access is denied (0x5).

I tried google and the (unofficial) Boinc wiki without success. My work units appear to still be crunching, so I'm not sure if I should be concerned or not. Thanks for any information.

Some questions for you...

(from JM7)
This is usually an access rights problem. Is the user that is running have full rights to the BOINC directory tree? This is either the current logged in user for single and multiple installs, or the service user for service installs.

(from Rom)
If you restart BOINC does it still happen? How about rebooting the
computer? Will the system let you delete client_state_prev.xml yourself?

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Kathryn :o)

(from JM7)
This is usually an access rights problem. Is the user that is running have full rights to the BOINC directory tree? This is either the current logged in user for single and multiple installs, or the service user for service installs.

(from Rom)
If you restart BOINC does it still happen? How about rebooting the
computer? Will the system let you delete client_state_prev.xml yourself?

User is running as administrator and has full permissions over the directory (it was a single user install).

The problem has happened twice so far, both times following me initially starting the program. The message is not predicatably repeatable. It's happened once with the previous version and once with 5.8.3.

I am running kaspersky AV and will consider excluding the files mentioned in this thread to see if that helps.

>Will the system let you delete client_state_prev.xml yourself?

I can try this but would like to know what deleting that file will do?

>Will the system let you delete client_state_prev.xml yourself?

I can try this but would like to know what deleting that file will do?

Every time that BOINC starts up and writes to client_state.xml it makes a backup of the file to client_state_prev.xml

This is done in case something goes wrong, BOINC crashes and corrupts the client_state.xml file, there is a backup which is automatically used the next time you start BOINC.

To check if you have permissions to do changes to the directory, you can try to delete the backup file, client_state_prev.xml. If you can delete it without problems, you have full permissions to read/write/change the directory. If you get an error, you don't.

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(from JM7)
This is usually an access rights problem. Is the user that is running have full rights to the BOINC directory tree? This is either the current logged in user for single and multiple installs, or the service user for service installs.

(from Rom)
If you restart BOINC does it still happen? How about rebooting the
computer? Will the system let you delete client_state_prev.xml yourself?

User is running as administrator and has full permissions over the directory (it was a single user install).

The problem has happened twice so far, both times following me initially starting the program. The message is not predicatably repeatable. It's happened once with the previous version and once with 5.8.3.

I am running kaspersky AV and will consider excluding the files mentioned in this thread to see if that helps.

>Will the system let you delete client_state_prev.xml yourself?

I can try this but would like to know what deleting that file will do?

Hmmm... Interesting. I'm running Kaspersky too.

Nothing bad happened when I tried deleting client_state_prev.xml. And I was successful in deleting it also.

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Kathryn :o)

And the latest email from David A.

If it's random it must be a conflict with virus checker-type program.
My last checkin (which gives a timeout of at least 5 sec,
rather than a random timeout between 0 and 5 sec) may fix it.
-- David

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Kathryn :o)

I can delete client_state_prev.xml which I expected to be able to do.

The error happened again today after project results were uploaded. After this happened, I added both files to Kaspersky's trusted zone and excluded them from all scans. We'll see if this helps. The only other real time agent I have running is windows defender.

New problem. I got a message when I pressed update that a project file could not be deleted. I did not record the full error text but I believe it was another access denied issue.

Upon restarting boinc later I received the message that:

State File Error: result not found



I guess I just need to exclude the entire directory. Is it possible that whatever is being done with regard to the trying to rename the state file for 5 seconds could be done for all actions where this can happen (like deleting old projects for instance)?

I was having the same problem and I added exclusions for the two state .xml files to my config -- running NOD32 on XP-Pro.