Wondering why they are asking for help here instead of the appropriate place, the BOINC forums.
BOINC Message boards
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Yea ā¦ strangeā¦ why would they or anyone ask any question out side the official forum for KDE, Ubuntu, Gnome, LibreOffice, Pidgin, any of the hardware manufacturesā¦ USB issues clearly isnt a OS thing until you have 100% verified via testing and third party its not. As a matter of fact - why are there ANY forums other than those by those who make thingsā¦ Hmmmmmmmm
Not trying to be a smartass, but there are people that are official BOINC helpers on the BOINC boards.
His issue is not an uncommon one, in fact very common and the problem crops up weekly for those still unexperienced in the ways of BOINC.
A quick search in the forums would have found a dozen threads about the issue and the solutions.
I would have posted about a BOINC solution that does not involve permission issues which is the most common trip up. But the OP said he is giving up. Shame they didnāt use the offered resources.
You can install BOINC not as a restricted service, but rather via the original Berkeley installation method into the /home directory. Problem solved about permissions or where files are hiding.
They are all in one BOINC folder in /home. Not scattered around the disk with symlinks everywhere.
Simplifies matters immensely.
If anyone is interested here is the link to the All-in-One BOINC package.
All-in-One BOINC installation package
Just unzip the package somewhere in /home and double-click the boincmgr file to start the client and the GUI.
Thanks for the explanation and for the hints. This will certainly help future readers.
Now, that you are here and you seem to be familiar with the issue, you can surely help in solving it by providing the solution. 
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Well the distros all have there own ideas how to package BOINC. So you have to first establish which distro they have installed BOINC from.
The basics for a service install:
sudo systemctl stop boinc-client
sudo systemctl start boinc-client
sudo systemctl status boinc-client
sudo systemctl restart boinc-client
But also want to point out that a lot of BOINC users, especially Windows users got bit by the DST Root CA X3 root certificate expiring 30 September. That affected BOINC because the bundled ca-bundle.crt file in BOINC has that root certificate. So nobody was able to connect to projects because of the SSL problem. But since the OP posted the issue before that problem cropped up, that is not the issue here.
But for others interested in this aspect of the issue, the BOINC devs have already created an issue and are working on a solution for a new version with new certificates. Of course, if using a distro install you are dependent on the distro package maintainers. The DIY solution is to delete that expired certificate from the ca-bundle.crt file and restart BOINC.
A good sanity check to see what might have gone wrong with BOINC is to launch the boinc client in a Terminal session and see what it says.
./boinc
If the output in the Terminal looks normal, then open up another Terminal session and launch the GUI BOINC Manager.
./boincmgr
Look for errors in that session. Look for the Manager window status bar to see whether the Manager can connect to the client. It should say it is connected to the LocalHost.
If it says it is disconnected you need to start looking at permissions. As already posted in this thread the first thing to do is adding your user to the boinc group.
sudo usermod -a -G boinc [your_user_name]
Also for good measure add yourself to the video group also.
Also the recent BOINC revisions have not allowed a blank gui_rpc_auth.cfg file. You have to put something in the file if the file is empty or just leave the original salted installation password.
For the distro installs the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file is in /etc/boinc-client with a symlink from /var/lib/boinc[-client] Permissions should be 664 with an owner of root and a group of boinc.
Again a sanity check for the password issue can be done in Terminal.
./boincmgr --password=[password]
These are the basic troubleshooting responses to āBOINC wonāt startā or āBOINC Manager shows no projectsā and the corrective action is dependent on how BOINC was installed and what was the installation source. So you really should start a thread in the BOINC forums for more immediate solutions.