Game crashes when starting up, takes rest of computer with it.

Well, since I downloaded 1.0.11, the game loads fine on one of my machines, but whenever I try to start it up on the second one, the screen goes all wonky on me (garbage fills the screen, the graphics are distorted and seem to have dots at their right edge), and after a few moments, my machine crashes and I have to hit the reset button, won't even respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL. Nothing I do seems to make any difference to it, it always crashes on that machine. It used to work perfectly before... here's the stats on my machines:

First, the one where it works:
AMD Duron 700Mhz
394 MB PCI 133 RAM
64 Mb GeForce4-MX video card (Driver version 41.09)
Running WinXP Pro


And the one where it crashes irrevocably:
AMD Athlon XP 2200+
1.0 GB DDR PC 2700 RAM
64 MB GeForce4 Ti4200 Video Card (Dirver version 45.23, the latest official WHQL drivers)
Running WinXP Pro

I suppose that the likely culprit is the drivers.. but the game was working perfectly before with those same drivers on my second machine, and then it broke after this latest upgrade... seems rather counter-intuitive to me that a game update would force me to *downgrade* my drivers... so here's hoping I won't have to do that.

Almost forgot.. DX9 on both machines.

Hello Kats:

I would make a couple of suggestions:

1. When things like this happen after an upgrade, the first thing I'd suggest would be to download Second Life again from http://secondlife.com/download/ Next goto your Windows Control Panel and use the Add/Remove Programs to uninstall Second Life. Then reinstall from the fresh copy your downloaded. There is a very minute chance this will help, but its a catch all attempt in case something is corrupted, especially in the cache.

2. Especially with AMD machines, there is the very real possibility this is due to an outdated AGP driver on your motherboard. What we suggest is going to your motherboard manufacturer's website and download all the latest drivers for your motherboard and update them. A word of caution, however. If you've never done this before, I highly reccomend you enlist the help of someone who has because this particular operation, when not done correctly, can cause more havoc than the "run in circles bug" at a Jetball event.

Good Luck,


Colin Linden

Allready tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game and it had no effect, but I'll try updating the mobo AGP drivers and let you know if it has any effect. Thanks!

Nope, didn't work. Installed the very latest motherboard drivers for my machine, specifically the AGP drivers (my motherboard is an MSI KT3+, the drivers were the latest VIA 4in1 Hyperion set from August), but it had no effect. As soon as I boot up the game, I get the title screen, it looks fine for abou a second, then the graphics go insane, everything looks fuzzy and pixelated, and a few seconds after that my computer stops responding entirely. Other 3D intensive games (ie. the newly released Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy game) run flawlessly, so I'm wiling to bet it's not my videocard that went on the fritz.. it started as soon as I upgraded to 1.0.11, and I'd made no other major changes to the system since the last game upgrade, at which point it had been working fine.. any other ideas?

At least I can play the game on my other box, but I'd really rather play it on this one, since I can play it comfortably at a higher resolution and with better responsiveness on this one usually.

Ack...

Allright, nevermind, it's not SL's fault after all, it's a false alarm. I still can't run the program from this machine, but it turns out that it's the video card's fault: I tried to run another 3D program and it did the same type of crash.. then another, and the same.. downgraded the drivers, same thing happened, now with all the 3D programs. I turn off the machine, open it up, look at my rather expensive video card, and see that a couple of the capacitors on it seem to be leaking something brown. And, perhaps not surprisingly, it's been out of warranty for several weeks now. Great. Oddly enough, it still works fine for regular everyday desktop tasks, it only goes bersekr when I ask for something 3D from it.

Anyway, just so you won't rack your brains anymore trying to figure out what's wrong with my game, it's my video card that's fried. At least now I have an excuse for upgrading. For some reason the problems only started showing up in SL at first, and then the rest of the programs started glitching, until now nothing 3D is playable, it all crashes the machine. Ah well, if anyone has a spare Radeon 9700 Pro or higher they wanna just give away, i'm looking for a new vid card.

PS: never, ever buy a PNY video card. They're unreliable (mine's been sent in for repair/replacement more than once) and their customer service is downright painful. And apparently their video cards' capacitors burst once the warranty expires. Just FYI.