crashing problem

I'm new, so please bear with me if this is a known issue. I've been getting random crashes where suddenly my screen will be completely covered with a "grid" composed of tiny squares that switch rapidly in color from red to green to blue ... etc. At that point I'm completely frozen, and half the time my system then reboots on its own. If it doesn't reboot, I have to manually reboot to get out of it.

For some reason this seems to happen a lot in Ahern. I thought it might be because of the large number of avs, but I've been around crowds elsewhere and haven't had it happen. It has happened elsewhere, though, when I've been completely alone. Sometimes it will happen every few minutes, sometimes I can play for hours without it happening. It's getting pretty frustrating.

After a crash, I usually have to delete the game cache in order to log back in, otherwise the same freeze happens when I'm logging in.

My system exceeds the minimum specs (barely):
Athlon 850 MHz processor
256K ram
Geforce 3 Ti 200
cable modem

One last thought ... it happened to me a lot when I was wearing the newbie clothes, and almost every time when I'd try to edit them. Doesn't seem to happen as much now that I'm wearing different clothes. Maybe in Ahern I'm seeing people in newbie clothes and that's causing it? I know that sounds farfetched, but is there something about the way the newbie clothes are rendered that's different from custom clothes?

Thanks.

I'm positive that there's a GeForce 3 problem, but it's very rare, only affects certain hardware/driver combinations, and seems to be a general 3d thing, not SL-specific. It results in rendering a bunch of tiny dots all over the screen, but I don't think that's what you're seeing.

Is it possible for you to take a screenshot right when it happens, before it crashes?

What motherboard do you have? VIA chipset, right? Are you running the latest chipset and video drivers? (Video drivers available at http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp.)
What version of DirectX are you running? What version of Windows?

Thanks for your reply, Catherine. I'm using one of the early Athlon motherboards, the Gigabyte GA-71X, with AMD750 chipset. I know it's a dinosaur, but it's all I have until next summer when I can afford to slap a new motherboard/processor in it.

All drivers are up to date, and I'm running Windows XP with DirectX 9.

I'll try to take a screenshot, but I don't think it'll work as the system locks up completely the instant the problem occurs.

I've played quite a few other online games (Tribes 2, Quake 3, Ghost Recon, Sims Online, Sociolotron, etc.) and haven't had this problem before.

I don't suppose you know anyone with an extra video card you could borrow to see if that helps, do you? Even a GeForce 2 MX could be just fine.

Unfortunately, no. I could possibly get my hands on a prehistoric Voodoo 3, but that's it. That's the problem with living out in the wilderness ... how we managed to get cable modem service here is beyond me.

Also no go on the screenshot. System was locked up tight. I'll try to shoot a picture of the screen with my digital camera next time it does it and see how that comes out.

Thanks for trying. I do appreciate it.