Esteban Feld

This is actually a huge issue that needs seriously looking at, and fixing. This is because the Second Life driver is taking over/merging with the Nvidia Global driver and making Nvidia video cards (a) run hotter just when idling at desktop with no programs open - up to 18 degrees Celsius hotter on my GTX 680, (b) obviously making the fan/s work harder too and © increasing the user's electricity bill and (d) decreasing the lifespan of the video card. To be absolutely clear - the issue is NOT just that when Second Life is open, the video card runs at Maximum performance. It is that simply installing Second Life (or Firestorm etc) and opening it ONCE, modifies the Nvidia Global Driver Power Management from Adaptive to Maximum Performance, and from thenceforth your computer's video card will suffer the above four issues (a to d) even when Second Life is closed, even when you reboot... i.e. always until you uninstall Second Life or use a third-party program like Nvidia Inspector, mentioned by Ryu earlier, to change settings for the Second Life driver through it, which is not ideal, especially for thousands of users who are (a) not even aware that having Second Life on their computer is doing this to their machine's video card, (b) are not aware of this Nvidia Inspector workaround or © lack the know-how not to mess it up. Note that adding Second Life/Firestorm etc to the Nvidia Control Panel's Manage 3D Settings and manually entering "Adaptive" in the program's Power Management setting does NOT work. This would be a better/easier workaround if only it did work. An issue relating to a program that affects hardware on your machine to this extent, even when the program is not running, should be Maximum Priority for the developers.

Thanks for posting, all. Good to know it's a general problem, so I don't have to go through the hassle of contacting support. Hopefully we should be able to login within an hour or so, if similar past experiences are anything to go by. Fingers crossed.