Sadly, we're using DeepFreeze in our Mac labs (my Radmind guru has departed for a full-time job). In order to preserve BOINC crunching--and user logs (the asl directory)--all the machines have an "invisible" partition called .stuff. I used the "move BOINC" instructions to move the data directory to .stuff and there was much automatic happy-happy-joy-joy crunching. 100% of the lab machines (circa 10.6.4) were configured successfully

As I would apply system/security updates, many machines lost their BOINC daemon happiness. If I logged in manually, BOINC would start but not make a connection to the data directory on .stuff. If I manually quit BOINC and restarted it, crunching would resume.

Console gives me this cryptic message:
9/23/11 8:53:59 AM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[133] (edu.berkeley.boinc) Ignored this key: UserName
9/23/11 8:53:59 AM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[133] (edu.berkeley.boinc) Ignored this key: GroupName

The only other thing I can add is that if I turn off automatically start at login, the first manual start gives a boinc daemon error message. Dismissing the message, quitting and then restarting BOINC resumes the crunching.

I'd *really* like to continue automatic BOINC crunching, but with such a high failure rate every time I run routine maintenance I may not be able to afford the time (once a machine fails, I have been unable to resurrect BOINC crunching) and human resources to do so until I can get Radmind back up and running.

I wonder if *maybe* Apple was tinkering under the hood to prep for 10.7 and not telling people things again. I remember when launchd replacing cron caused issues which got fixed once people were aware of the need for a fix.

I'm happy to supply any log data. Bear in mind I don't really know where all the stuff is hidden.

Oh SUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRE!

I uninstalled Parallels 4.x and now-apparently--the daemon runs fine.

Grrrrrrrrr......

Coulda. Woulda. Shoulda.