Imagine there are no miners. This is the practical endgame result when the chance of solving a block drops so low there is no point for ordinary users to be a miner.

Why would I run a Bitcoin client then? What are my incentives?

The health of the bit coin network or maybe society? There will always be some that do this. But most people value short gain profit over anything else.. Ref 'tragedy of the commons' or for that matter 'environment problem X'.

Perhaps I will run it because I use Bitcoin myself? I would certainly use it in the moments I need access to Bitcoins.
But in the 'idle' periods? I have no incentive, this would just be another bandwidth user and potential entrance into my system.

Give me incentive. Give me a chance of 'earning' something running my client and I would probably run it. But in my scenario, remember that there is no practical chance of getting a payment for a new block, so I would be interested in earning the transaction fee instead.

But once you have incentive for doing something, you run into the Sybil problem the Microsoft researchers try to defeat with their hybrid model. Assume zombie networks with lots of machines running for this purpose, and they might be able to at least push their odds in their favor.

The Microsoft analysis seems to be a sound analysis, given some assumptions. I believe that we, as technical people, should do less posturing and more scientific method. If you disagree, see if you can disprove that their assumptions were correct or try to prove a different model. I happen to agree.

It sounds like you mix up 'not treating you' with 'treating you any way they please'.

By that I mean that what you see as 'poor treatment' could as well be seen as 'no capacity to respond'.

I was going to write something here on how 'real' game companies treat forums and tasks spawned from forums, but really. There is no point.
If a "quit your whining"-post was enough to prevent you from rejoining FoldIt, then I don't believe it was really ever an option. Maybe you were in it because of the social hooks and the achievements, not because it was fun? That would certainly explain why bad customer support killed it for you.

Anyway, you don't find it worth your time. And that's fair enough, it's your time.

You can find some master/slave power strips that only gives power to the slave outputs if the master output is drawing more than a certain amount of power.
Put your computer on the master output and the monitor/printer/whatever on the slave outputs.
When you then suspend or turn off the computer, the peripherals power down.

Google had flagged supicious activity on my e-mail account as well, but I had used a unique password generated with "Keypass Password Safe", my new best friend. (Seriously, with ~100 passwords, this is a good way to keep them unique).

This may be the first time I know my paranoia has been useful, but I'm feeling pretty good about paranoia today.