A fresh install of BOINC appears to start correctly and the management GUI offers to register with a project but after registration the GUI froze and the client had crashed.
Starting the client from a terminal showed this....

[edev@localhost ~]$ /usr/bin/boinc_client &
[1] 4382
[edev@localhost ~]$ 16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Starting BOINC client version 5.10.45 for i686-pc-linux-gnu
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] log flags: task, file_xfer, sched_ops
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Libraries: libcurl/7.15.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8e zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.5
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Data directory: /home/edev
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Processor: 1 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1500MHz [Family 6 Model 9 Stepping 5]
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 tm pbe up est tm2
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] OS: Linux: 2.6.22.15.tex2
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Memory: 1010.85 MB physical, 3.36 GB virtual
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Disk: 92.25 GB total, 88.18 GB free
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Local time is UTC +10 hours
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] No general preferences found - using BOINC defaults
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Preferences limit memory usage when active to 505.42MB
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Preferences limit memory usage when idle to 909.76MB
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Preferences limit disk usage to 9.31GB
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] This computer is not attached to any projects
16-May-2008 09:43:18 [---] Visit http://boinc.berkeley.edu for instructions
16-May-2008 09:45:12 [---] Fetching configuration file from http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/get_project_config.php
16-May-2008 09:45:42 [---] Running CPU benchmarks
16-May-2008 09:45:42 [---] Suspending computation - running CPU benchmarks
16-May-2008 09:45:47 [World Community Grid] Master file download succeeded
SIGSEGV: segmentation violation

I tried another project and it failed the same way.

(IBM thinkpad T41 - PCLOS 2008 - Gnome)

Any suggestions ?