Halp! Head section on skins borked

Well I have several skins, some from Abyss, some from Max and a few from FNKY. Well one day I decided to use a basic city chic skin and make it all blue to mock some poseballs I had. Well now on all my skins (even the no-mod ones) the head is a solid blue from that blue skin. The blue skin is ok, but all my other skins are like this. The Abyss maker was nice enough to send me another copy when I have him the Transaction ID but no dice, this one is blue on the head section too. Some skins wont even load and it will appear as the broken Abyss one.

I tried detatch all, taking off all cloths, and moving to a non-laggy sim. I have been having some bad lag lately too due to my ISP working on some lines. Also the power went out 3 or 4 times causing SL to crash. Wondering if that might have cause this, ohh and I also cleared the cache. What should I do?

Clear your cache.

Edit menu, preferences. Network tab (I think), "Clear Cache" button. Restart SL, and the problem will likely go "poof".

Sorry forgot to add I tried that, and before I did that it was just the one skin broken. After I did it they all broke. Going to try a reinstall.

I'm going to take a guess. I don't have any non-modify skins to work with to experiment.

Take a look at your skin color modifiers. (Edit Appearance -> Skin Tab -> Skin Color Button.) I bet you played with the Rainbow Color slider, and didn't set it back. I think (this is where I cannot experiment) that Rainbow Color is independent of your skin as far as settings go. However, this color may be bleeding through whatever skin you put on.

This is going to sound really wierd, but:

Clear your cache (without logging in). Then, log in to a sim you've not been in before. (a few sim names for you: Ahern, Morris, Caldbeck, Waterhead)

That way you won't be fetching the images from a sim's cache either, but right off the asset servers.

Re-install did not work....

Okay I will try this, sec

*sigh* did not work.

Crap.
I'm out of ideas, sorry. Is OK though, someone smarter than I will be along shortly, no doubt =^_^=

Try Ctrl-Alt-R (rebake textures). If that fails after a 30 second wait, then try toggling "on" or "off" Anisotropic filtering under your hardware settings in Preferences.

The reason I make this suggestion is that I deal with reloading textures from multiple skins/avs all the time, and the most common server/client mixup I run into is what you are describing. I hope it works for you. Good luck!

In addition to Namssor's excellent suggestions, two other possibilities:

1. It is possible that your avatar has become corrupted such that the head area can no longer "wear" a skin. Fortunately, it's easy to start over with a brand new avatar ... just be sure that you know where all the parts (shape, eyes, bald cap, etc.) are that you usually wear!

Advanced > Character > Character Tests > Test female (or male)

will give you a completely new avatar to start from. Do this, clear cache, relog, and then put on everything you usually wear.

2. It's aLso possible that your graphic card's local cache has gotten borked. Reloading this can be forced from SL if you can't figure out how to do it in your graphics driver; but try the other things first. I'll check back later when I can login to see if you need to know how to do this.

Good luck!
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Find the SL cache folder on your computer and delete the whole thing. Clearing cache the standard way doesn't always remove all of the data and there may be something corrupt left in there. For XP, it's located at C:\Documents and Settings\'user name\Application Data\SecondLife

You may want to delete the entire SL Application Data folder if doing just the cache doesn't work.

I just skimmed this, but has anyone suggested rebake yet?

I've had some seriously bizarre avatar texture issues in the past and rebake never fails to correct it. The only other thing could indeed be a corruption somewhere in the SL files.....or perhaps a graphics card that has gone wiggy.

I'd say if every other element of SL runs smooth for you....and rebake and cache clearing do not work. You choices are probably to uninstall SL in it's entirety and re-install. Or, update your graphics card pronto.

Yay this worked! Thanks everybody!