Help with installation and running SL

Hi...I am very new to SL. I have installed and reinstalled with no luck. Get the message when trying to open SL it crashed. And when the box comes up loading SL I cannot enter my password. When it finally did one time, everything loaded slow and I could not go any further, it appears to be hung up. And there is a sound that goes thong thong continually while the SL window is open. It goes away if I close out of SL. I wonder if someone could let me know if my graphics card is okay. I have checked the requirements and think everything looks okay but clearly something is not right. Oh, I almost forgot. I did download the latest driver for my graphics card.....

NVIDEA GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+ ....... 512.00MB adaptor ram

ty......

why is no one offering me some help? Did I post wrong? I cannot get SL to work and my machine should be able to handle it.... ty

At the moment SL is closed to logins so you won't be able to get in anyway.

But, to your problem. All we know is that you crash mostly before you even get to your login screen and that you have an nVidia 9800GTX (with updated drivers). The card will work. And the fact your computer is even able to have that card in it means your computer should work too. But, we still need something to work with. Are you using Vista or XP 64 bit? There has been issues with the 9000 series nVidia card and 64 bit operating systems. Are you connecting to the internet wirelessly or cabled? How much system RAM (and type) does your computer have? Firewall....is it blocking access? Anti virus.....is it interferring? We know nothing.......we can't even guess.

That's why no one has answered you until now.

You mentioned you updated your driver. Did you uninstall your old driver first? That is important for driver installations (all drivers, not just graphics). Aside from that, I have nothing else until I get a hint on which direction to think, let alone what to tell you.