Completely Inane Crashing

I've kept this one to myself thus far because to ensure I've tried every last thing I can think of, but this one just has me beat. I'm a tech with a fair cop of experience, it's very rare I come across a problem I cannot solve myself, but this one...jeezus.

My SL crashes, and saying that alone would be a grevious understatement. It doesn't lock up, and it doesn't dump out - the program just suddenly eats up the entire CPU and overloads it so badly that it takes nearly 6 to 7 minutes, -literally- to alt-tab out of the game, get into the task manager and shut it down; which doesn't always work, at that.

The biggest problems I have in this though; is that there is an insane level of randomness in this crashing - What I mean is, I am yet to find a single thing that could even -possibly- be causing the crashing - it seems to happen, literally, when it feels like it crashing.

Now this sounds hard to swallow, sure; but consider this - the program will run for a good couple of hours strait without an hitch, then suddenly crash. Other times, it will run for an impressive 60~80 seconds before crashing in this way - It doesn't matter what attachments I have on (even none at all), it doesn't matter if I don't teleport anyway, or even leave my home location, it doesn't matter what clothes my avatar is wearing, nor even how many or what avatars of the local area are around at the time, even when I'm the only one in the whole sim logged in, with no attachments, and no clothes worn, it will still crash like this.

This has me really bugged; and it's getting infuriating. I can't find anything that even -helps-, I can't even find an actual cause - let alone a sollution.

I'd really appreciate some kind of input here on just what's going on, I'm about ready to cancel my acount and walk away from the game, because it's just getting absalutely ridiculous.

Just some thoughts, no solutions.

The problem has to be hardware related. I've had a couple of unexpected crashes on 1.6.7, but nothing like that, and I'm sure we would know about it if the problem was more widespread. Do you have another PC you could use to lend weight to the theory - or shoot it down in flames.

It does sound vaguely like a problem I had a few years ago, which was eventually traced to a faulty cpu fan. Noisy fans do have one advantage

neb

i have literally the EXACT same problem,
except my clock doesnt overrun, SL just crashes and goes to crash report,
i tried everything, turning particles off, raising disk cache, lowering disk cache, altering draw distance, etc

This really does sound like the CPU is decimating clock rate to avoid heat damage. If y'all haven't checked your CPU, Power supply and case fans, do! And while you have the cases open, take a can of dry air and give it all a dusting off.

If you have a laptop, it's almost certainly caused by what Jillian is describing. Laptops don't deal with heat well.

Based on the crash logs, my other suggestions would be:

1) Install Service Pack 2 for XP.
2) Turn off VPU Recovery in ATI's control panel.