Boinc Manager

No, it's not normal but it can easily happen if the Manager starts before the BOINC Daemon (the client - the background process that does all the work) is fully running. This can happen if your system is busy with a lot of other tasks - during startup for example. The Manager (the B icon) you mention is just a GUI that allows you to communicate easily with the client.

No, you need to open an account and you need to attach to a project using those account credentials. You have no computer registered here yet so you haven't been able to complete the attach process. We'll try to help you fix that.

You should try to kill all of these. If normal methods don't work, use the Windows Task Manager and see if you can kill them from there. If you still can't kill them, shut down your computer completely and then do a cold reboot. If you have chosen to start BOINC automatically, BOINC should fire up as part of the startup process and you should get just one BOINC Manager process this time and its GUI Window should say "Connected to localhost" in the status area at the bottom of the window.

If you can kill all the Managers without rebooting, check also to see if you have the daemon (boinc.exe) running by looking with task manager. If it is running, fire up a Manager (boincmgr.exe) and it should find the daemon and attach to it at which point the status will show "connected" as mentioned above.

Try out these steps first and post back describing what happens. Until you get a Manager connected to the client you can't do anything else.

EDIT: Sorry, Stick, I didn't see your response which came while I was composing mine.

@bobyoungaz,

Please don't start the same query on multiple boards. This board, "Getting Started" is the perfect place for your question. The help staff (mainly all volunteers) are stretched thinly enough as it is without having to answer the same question in two different places.