Second Life keeps crashing seconds/minutes after logging on.

[Kasianni Nikolaidis]

I have played SL for 4 years. The past 8 months have been terrible. When I log on, SL crashed within minutes. Sometimes seconds. I have un-installed the viewer and re-installed it. Tried different views and 3rd party viewers. I have updated my graphics driver and haven't made any changes on pc since all this started. I have emptied my viewer cache, I have tried everything. Sometimes it crashes just the game, many times my whole pc crashes. Everything else, games included work fine. Its only SL that does not work anymore. I have heard there is a texture bug that tries to load so many textures that the graphic card can't handle it. Is this true or BS? I installed the latest viewer yesterday and I logged on and the top bar started flashing and then crashed. I had phoenix 2 weeks ago and managed to stay logged on for 45 minutes but can't even stay logged in anymore. Please can someone help me figure this out, I am so frustrated with this situation. It started with some textures looking odd and bars of colors on walls etc, then it would get worse if I tp'd somewhere, and now I can't even stay logged in. If anyone can help would very much appreciate it. Thanks!

[Cinnamon Lohner]

It kinda sounds like your graphics card may be overheating and/or potentially starting to fail.  The flashing top bar and the bands of color are both symptoms of overheating.  Crashing the entire PC will also occur under those conditions.

Start by cleaning your PC.  Getting rid of all the dust bunnies and make sure you have good air flow around the graphics card.

--Cinn

[Rolig Loon]

There are a couple of odd bugs that will make you crash almost immediately.  Here's one that affects Firestorm and may also cause problems on other viewers:

When you receive notifications, unless you dismiss them, they accumulate for later reading, in the small envelope icon on the lower right of the screen. Over time, they will grow in number. If you log out, these unread notifications are saved for when you next log in. If there are too many of them, processing them during next log in can cause a log in time out and you will be disconnected. The solution here is to delete the file with the saved notifications.

• Locate your Firestorm settings folder. If you do not see this folder, you may need to show hidden folders.
  • On XP: C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\Firestorm
    or use the environment variable %APPDATA%)
  • On Windows Vista and 7: C:\Users\[uSERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Firestorm
    (or use the environment variable %APPDATA%)
  • On a Mac: /Users/[YOUR USERNAME]/Library/Application Support/Firestorm
  • On Linux: ~/.firestorm
• In this folder, open each folder which has the name of your SL account(s) and inside that, delete the file called open_notifications.xml - this will result in all past, unread notifications being lost.

There is also an issue with having too many active gestures.  See http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/doku.php?id=gesture_issues  for a discussion of that one.   I'm not aware of a similar issue with textures. I can imagine a circumstance in which an underpowered graphics card gets overwhelmed, overheats, and causes a crash, but you would probably see other symptoms of overheating as well.

ETA:  Ah... I missed the flashing top bar when I read it before.  That might be an overheating symptom.