I have been following the guidelines in the wiki on how to set up and configure the BOINC server and client. I have the BOINC server running in Virtual Box on a Windows 7 64-bit PC and the Windows BOINC client installed. On the server I've configured and set up the example project i.e.
./make_project --db_pass boincadmpw --delete_prev_inst --drop_db_first --url_base http://a.b.c.d --test_app test
where a.b.c.d is the ip of the server. The project page shows up and all services are running. When the client connects though, I get a simple reply:
8/3/2012 4:28:59 PM | test | Sending scheduler request: Project initialization.
8/3/2012 4:28:59 PM | test | Requesting new tasks for CPU and NVIDIA
8/3/2012 4:29:00 PM | test | Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
8/3/2012 4:29:00 PM | test | Message from server: An %%s GPU is required to run tasks for this project
8/3/2012 4:29:00 PM | test | No tasks sent

Not sure what is going on. Earlier in the log I can see that i have an NVIDIA GPU:
8/3/2012 3:48:13 PM | | NVIDIA GPU 0: Quadro FX 580 (driver version 270.71, CUDA version 4.0, compute capability 1.1, 457MB, 219MB available, 108 GFLOPS peak)
8/3/2012 3:48:13 PM | | OpenCL: NVIDIA GPU 0: Quadro FX 580 (driver version 270.71, device version OpenCL 1.0 CUDA, 457MB, 219MB available)

Any ideas what I could be doing wrong? I'm not even certain the example applicaton uses the GPU.

Looks like a corruption in the code. You did use the Debian-6 BOINC server image from here to set up the server?

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Yup, it was a corruption in the sched_send.cpp code. That is now fixed.
You should be able to fix it by running the newest source code from trunk\boinc\

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Yes the error message was deceiving. However, the problem seemed to be my fault. I had ran make_project several times when trying to figure out how to get the client to respond to the server. What I had missed was the last step of update_versions. This meant that no executables were cataloged for the project so nothing could be executed from the clients. Once that was resolved it is all working correctly now.