what's there to understand?  the people on the project can't make a
distributed server work.  every other BOINC project can make it work just
fine. distributed.net has been doing it for years, with code based on the
back orifice trojan. every wanna-be-uber-leet-haxor in the world can make
a server work on someone else's computer.  now, shall I post instructions
for the netbios exploit, or can they find their way to carol meinel's
website on happy hacking on their own.

You're not paying attention. The problem is not the servers, they were working just fine before the power problems started.