Crashed; Unable to Restart SL

I was on earlier tonight (an hour or so ago), and my system locked up, requiring me to press the reset button. When I returned, the client refuses to start at all, crashing to desktop immediately as it's supposed to be getting to the login screen. Nothing I've done seems to be helping.

I've tried:
- Installing latest video card drivers
- Uninstalling ALL versions of SL
- Reinstalling SL
- Letting Windows run CHKDSK
- Removing some residual registry entries

Nothing works. Still crashing to desktop.

Is there ANYTHING else I can try? This is getting very annoying, naturally.

Thank you in advance.

Manually delete the Second Life folder where the cache is. On XP this is C:\Documents and Settings\"user name"\Application Data\SecondLife. This folder does not get removed and recreated on an uninstall and re-install, and there are files in that which can become corrupted and cause problems.

I've tried that as well.

I've also tried the official viewer only, release candidate only, and both.

The crash happens JUST as the client window resizes itself, which leads me to believe there's some OTHER settings that aren't being deleted.

If this keeps up, the only other option I'll have left is a complete reinstall on the OS, and I'd really hate to have to do that.

When faced with problems of this nature, I try to make sure that I have in fact deleted everything, and the computer is restarted from cold.

Therefore, having deleted everything you can think of, search your drives for any secondlife folders or files, to make sure every thing is cleaned out.

Carry out a hard restart, ie power down the computer completely, then restart manually.

I have found that glitches caused by random power failures etc can often be resolved by this means, the hard restart is often overlooked.

Good luck

Don't know if it is relevant in this case, but some graphics drivers have a bad habit of not cleaning up correctly from the old version when you install a new one on top. (I'm looking at you, nVidia!)
Completely uninstalling the old driver, dropping to the default VGA driver, and *then* installing the new one has helped me once before with a crash like this.

In tough cases it's also a good idea to power of any router/modem you've got too. At the point were you are crashing the client is establishing connections with I believe 3 different LL servers. If your modem somehow got a bogus NAT/DNS/firewall/port-forwarding/etc/etc entry it will pass the client a useless cached entry and the connection will fail. SL does not handle such failure gracefully.

I agree on the router/modem reset too, I tend to do this as a matter of habit when I reset the computer. I didn't know that SL dislikes router/modem problems.

You've probably done this already..but have you tried a "system restore" back to a time before this problem appeared? Of course that only applies to a PC..not sure how a Mac handles this.
Hope you find a solution soon .

I did find a solution, but it was the one I didn't really want to go through. I really needed a clean XP install, though, so it was for the best.

Before doing a operating system reinstall, one could try manually going through regedit and deleting any Second Life entries left around.

It worked for me once.