Unable to teleport, change clothes, new clothes do not show up in inventory? Many problems!

[Keira Pichot]

I have been using SL for a few years now, but hadn't logged in for at least a year until about two weeks ago.

Since logging in again I have had many problems;

1) I am unable to teleport and do not receive teleport requests from my friends

2) I am unable to change clothes

3) I have purchased new clothes since trying SL again, but the clothes do not appear in my inventory

Can anyone help? What is the possible cause of these issues?

Thanks!

[Rolig Loon]

Each of those problems sounds like a communication lapse between your computer and SL's servers.  Changes to your appearance are all made on your own computer, where they are baked into a single composite image and uploaded to the servers.  The inventory that you access in your viewer is a locally cached copy of the original that is in the servers, and is updated on your computer whenever you add or delete items.  Teleporting involves transferring information about your avatar from one set of servers to another, again with a lot of communication between the servers and your own computer. 

The weakest link is often your router, which may simply need to be rebooted.  Just unplug it from the power for a few minutes to clear its RAM and get a fresh grasp on an IP address.  If you have been using wireless, get off it.  Wireless is susceptible to all manner of interference and bandwidth loss, and is a common source of problems for SL residents. To rebuild local cache that may have been corrupted by flaky communication, go to Preferences >> Network and click the Clear Cache button.  Then log in to a quiet sim like Smith or Aqua and type a single letter in the Search field of your Inventory to jump start the rebuilding process. Don't do ANYTHING until it is finished.

Finally, in the year or more since you last logged in, there have been several major upgrades to each of the popular viewers and to SL's servers.  Unless you have also upgraded your own computer, it may be less compatible with SL than it used to be, so you may have difficulty with some actions that used to be easy.  You may need to revisit your Preferences settings, lowering draw distance or your quality slider and making other adjustments.