Exit zero status; no finished file - observations

I have spotted something that might shed some light on this message.

Win XP SP2 set up as single user (ie I never see the Windows logon screen) on this computer

BOINC 4.45 set up in single user mode holding 2 E@H wu and 1 CPDN wu; 2 other projects attached but they currently had no local work. E@H wu was running at the time, cpdn wu shown as pre-empted.

I was geeking away watching the XP task manager, running disk searches & watching the effect on BOINC in the task manager display while I starting and interrupting the searches. By luck I also had the BOINC manager window open in the messages tab.

The usual behaviour observed was: When I click on the win-XP start search button while BOINC is running it takes from 39 - 58sec before the search gets going. I'd done it several times to get a range of figures (told you I was being a geek at the time!).

However, on two occasions, I clicked on start search the search started instantly, and at exactly the same time as far as I could tell by eye, the message pooped up in the manager window saying the E@H wu had exited with zero status no 'finished' file. BOINC Manager then showed the wu restarting, and after maybe 30sec the wu had regained its former status.

This effect is not repeatable on demand: after seeing it the first time I tried to provoke it and couldn't; but then later on I got the same effect again. I then tried again to force a repeat it but again could not force it to come up on demand.

In my experience the repeated but non-repeatable effect hints at some sort of timing problem, but I am no expert on the insides of windows and don't want to be...

I hope that this observation is of some use to the BOINC devs. It is not a complaint, and if it counts as a bug it does not seem to be a severe one. It may or may not be linked to my subjective impression that Win-XP is slower to respond to the mouse when 4.45 is running than it used to be under 4.19.