any help in loading 1.4?

Any advice in what works to get online with 1.4??
I get as far as "your clothing is still downloading...", and then everything hangs. The graphics for the sim never fully load, I see a partial landscape. My avatar never appears, it's like being in mouseview. Events, people, places, etc never load.
I've emptied cache, deleted and redownloaded SL, and made sure graphics card (nvidia) was updated...
I tried to send a message thru the knowledge base, but got a fatal error message.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Helllooo!
What has worked for others who had this problem?

It *could* be sim related. Try forcing SL to log you into a different sim, and see if that helps.