Rendering problems

I've been experiencing some rendering problems at my house in Stanford (100, 70).

http://www.grimolfr.com/sl/images/render_prob.jpg

In this snapshot, my avatar is standing on a concrete slab similar to the surrounding slabs. Notice that the slab isn't rendered at all, and there's another slab that isn't rendered.

Also, if you look at my neighbor's place in the upper left corner, you'll see that a section of his wall is missing.

I was here for awhile before taking this snapshot, so it's not a matter of waiting for downloads. Besides, all of the slabs use the same texture.

Also, I'm having a culling problem. Or a problem with the order in which objects are rendered. This slab is to large for a single prim, so I have several "spliced" together. Sometimes as I'm walking around I'll see the edge of one slab drawn on top of it's neighbor, almost as if the nearer slab were parially transparent. Initially I thought it might be my video card, except that my neighbor can see it, too.

Recently, in an attempt to fix this second problem, I applied a transparent texture to all of the edges that are supposed to be hidden. This seems to solve that issue, but now I have other weirdness with sections of walls dissappearing at certain angles/distances.

I sent in bug reports for the first two problems last night.

Here are my system specs:

Intel P4 2.0GHz
512 MB RAM (Rambus)
PNY Verto GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (256 MB Video memory)
Detonator 4.4.0.3 video drivers.

last time I checked my connection speed, I was operating at about 1.7Mb/s

Did I leave out any pertinent tech specs?

I'm going to tack an additional question onto this:

Are there going to be changes any time in the reasonably near future that will allow those of us with 128/256MB video cards to benefit from the extra VRAM??

The second and third problems (overlapping prims and partially rendered prims) seem to be a result of 32-bit TGA textures with a solid white alpha channel (show-all).

To answer your first question:

It's probably packet loss. I usually get packet loss during the evening hours and I have a similar connection as yours. If you get it again, hit alt+1 and it will tell you if you are experiencing packet loss. If you aren't, I don't know what to tell you hehe but it probably is packet loss.