OK, I'm sold.
Actually, I put BOINC on my office rig (that I'm currently heckling you on) last week- about 5 system iterations after I had a distributed-computing project the last time (maybe 2008?). Last time, configuration was very difficult, this time not so much at all (maybe several generations of OS upgrading helped a lot, I seem to remember Ubuntu and or PCLOS had major learning curves).