cant log in all i get is updating friendslist

[Rolig Loon]

From Nalates's blog (thank you, Nalates!):

Apparently that problem is caused by someone in your contact list who has changed the display name using one of these strange characters that, for some reason can’t be read by SL. So your contacts list can’t be updated.

Here how I managed to fix that :
1. I logged on my dashboard on http://www.secondlife.com
2. I went to mysecondlife web profile / settings / friends and managed to remove contacts with suspect display names written with strange characters.
3. After have deleted them, I was able to login normally.

This isn't the first time that some basic function in SL has been messed up by people using those cute high-bit UTF-8 characters in their Display Names or Group names.  They create a lot of problems. In this case, the login process is hanging up because it can't complete the download of your friends list.

[Rolig Loon]

From Nalates's blog (thank you, Nalates!):

Apparently that problem is caused by someone in your contact list who has changed the display name using one of these strange characters that, for some reason can’t be read by SL. So your contacts list can’t be updated.

Here how I managed to fix that :
1. I logged on my dashboard on http://www.secondlife.com
2. I went to mysecondlife web profile / settings / friends and managed to remove contacts with suspect display names written with strange characters.
3. After have deleted them, I was able to login normally.

This isn't the first time that some basic function in SL has been messed up by people using those cute high-bit UTF-8 characters in their Display Names or Group names.  They create a lot of problems. In this case, the login process is hanging up because it can't complete the download of your friends list.

[KarenMichelle Lane]

I wonder of turning off the Show Display Name option in Preferences would allow for login to complete? What's interesting is that this became an epidemic after the December 19th or 22nd Update/Patch push. This means that one of those characters became posion to logins because of a programming change during the preparation of some patch related to loading the lists

[Rolig Loon]

It's worth trying. FWIW, I keep Display Names turned off in my viewer normally and I have never had any login issue. But then I doubt that I have any friends who use those cute high-bit characters either.