SETI@home may block PPP connection

Readers have reported several different problems with the recently released SETI@home program and screen saver. The most commonly reported symptom is an inability to connect to the Internet via a PPP connection (apparently specific to using FreePPP). Patrick Ford writes: "Moving the SETI control panel from the control panel folder, rebooting and running it as an application fixes the problem but obviously it does not work as a screen saver then." J. Pape agrees. Timothy Dyke found that unchecking the "Enable Screen Saver" box was sufficient to get things working again.

Update: Andrew Howard confirms that using PPP instead of FreePPP avoids these problems. Sort of. He adds: "SETI@home may still crash when it tries to initiate a dialup connection on its own. If so, you need to set the preferences to alert you when it needs to connect. I have it running on B/W G3 300 with Mac OS 8.5.1. This was a problem in the beta versions too."