So I'm running Mac OSX on my Macbook with recently-buffed 4GB memory (yaaaay), and I rebooted the computer after the wireless started acting up. The wireless came back fine, but BOINC threw a fit. This was the second time that I've gotten an error when BOINC restarts after a computer reboot - something about a "permissions error -1202", and suggested detaching/reattaching to projects or reinstalling BOINC or something.

When I looked in the stderrgui.txt file, it seemed that BOINC was choking on accessing boinc_lockfile in the Rosetta project directory. Now, last time I just deleted the blocked files (the files gfx_info stderrgfx.txt, as it happened), as they didn't seem integral. I haven't noticed any problems since, but they never did get rebuilt. But the lockfile? That's something my comp-sci sense tells me is important.

So this time I looked at the file info - owner and such, y'know? It said that <my user name> was the file owner. The copy of boinc_lockfile in a Rosetta-active slot, though, said that boinc_project was its owner. Lightbulb! I popped a "sudo chown boinc_project boinc_lockfile" (the change owner command) in the command line and tried again to boot BOINC.

It still gave me the -1202 error - but this time, the log file tells me it's choking on something else! Victory! I ended up having to chown stderr.txt to boinc_project and boinc_minirosetta_0 to boinc_master before it grudgingly gave in and began crunching again.

I figure that the confused file ownership may have happened because I put BOINC into "snooze mode" before I quit during my reboot prep, but I have no way to tell. I know this worked for me in Mac OSX, so it ought to work exactly the same on a Linux box. I'm not sure how to do the same thing in Windows, and a quick Google hasn't been too helpful; but then again I don't know if the Windows versions of BOINC and Rosetta use the same sort of user permissions setup that the *nix family does.

So I hope that this helps other people continue folding with minimal fuss. Have a good one :)