Some pieces of software just seem to be from the past even though they’re very current. BOINC, for instance, always makes the annoying demand of rebooting the computer when you install it. Of course, that would be fine if it was actually necessary, but it isn’t. Demanding a restart is, unfortunately, still a fairly common behavior of current software, but usually you’re still given the choice, ie you can just try to launch the program anyway, and in 99.9% of cases it will work just fine.
BOINC doesn’t do that: after its installation, BOINC will refuse to start until you actually restart the computer. But the thing is, it won’t refuse to start because it does need Windows to be restarted, it will refuse to start because it detects that Windows hasn’t been restarted. Now, I bet you got the idea already: we just need to fool it into thinking you actually restarted.
During its installation, BOINC creates an empty file named RebootPending.txt in its root directory (ie same place as the BOINC executables). And then it schedules it for removal at the next start-up. Just delete that file, and you’ll be able to start BOINC without restarting the computer. It should then work totally fine, it really doesn’t need a restart at all, as far as I know.
On a side note, you may also want to remove BOINC from the HKLM run key: it places 2 entries there, no matter how you configure it not to run at start-up. What I mean is, even when you configure it (from its settings) not to run at start-up it does run at start-up, only it doesn’t start the distributed computations. Why this design? I have no idea…
PS: if you’re looking for HKLM run key: run ([windows key] + R) regedit then browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Then the values you want to smash are boincmgr and boinctray.
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