"Blue Screen of Death" Upon Starting Second Life

Hey y'all,

Three days ago I updated my viewer to version 1.21.6 and was able to login and stay online with success. The day before yesterday I was suddenly unable to login due to the inablility to "connect to a simulator" and after closing out and restarting, Second Life's screen wouldn't even load for me. I gave up and last night tried logging in again only to have my screen turn blue and inform me that "windows had encountered an error and needed to shut down to avoid further damage" or something to that effect. I reinstalled Second Life, rebooted my computer, so on with no such luck. I have tried several of the viewers and every one one of them kills the computer now. Has anyone had any experience with this or know what might be going on? Below are my system specs, all up to par with SL's reccommendations:

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System Information
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Time of this report: 2/23/2009, 11:27:47
Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6000) (6000.vista_gdr.080917-1612)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Gateway
System Model: GM5626
BIOS: Default System BIOS
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2180 @ 2.00GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.0GHz
Memory: 3070MB RAM
Page File: 1231MB used, 5092MB available
Windows Dir: C:\Windows
DirectX Version: DirectX 10

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Display Devices
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Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: GeForce 8500 GT
DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0421&SUBSYS_09601462&REV_A1
Display Memory: 1518 MB
Dedicated Memory: 239 MB
Shared Memory: 1278 MB
Current Mode: 1280 x 1024 (32 bit) (60Hz)

Thanks in advance, hopefully I can get this thing fixed without much of a hassle.

Without knowing the actual error on the bluescreen, my first guess would be it's a problem with the shared memory you've assigned to video. I would recommend undoing that. Shared memory is a nightmare. It sounds like that video card has 256MB of onboard memory. Leave it at that. Don't try to augment it with system RAM. Let the system RAM run the system. Use only real video memory for video, always.

My second suggestion would be to uninstall your current video driver, and install an SL-friendly version, such as 175.19 or 175.16. Make sure to run Driver Cleaner, to clear out all traces of your current driver. This is absolutely essential. Windows cannot uninstall drivers completely on its own. Pieces of them end up remaining behind, and then they cause problems down the line. You need a clean uninstall, and then a clean install. Follow the instructions for Driver Cleaner very carefully.

I have absolutely no clue what shared memory is. I know computers, but when it gets to technical stuff I'm at a complete loss. Is this something that I would have had to have done or could the memory have changed somehow? The only thing that has changed with my computer in the last week was the new SL viewer and before that, nothing major has been done.

As for the second suggestion, will do. Thank you!

Anyone else know of something that could be causing this problem?

well im kinda having the same problems, but my screen is black when clicking the secondlife on my desktop. It all happened 3-4 days ago, but i have not installed any new version of SL untill now, and that has not done the trick either. But i can log in ok, but i cannot tp anywhere at all, and always now takes ages to rezz my home and land or if i finaly do tp takes ages to rez that area to !

I am also using 1.21.6 viewer..