Missing people and objects - affects one viewer only!

Since 1.7 was released, and in every release since then, on into 1.8, I have noticed an odd glitch that happens randomly. People or objects are missing for one viewer, though others see them just fine. I've bug reported it, but wanted to illustrate it better here.

What happens is that I'll enter a room, and one or more people that everyone else can see, and whom I can hear in Chat just fine, are entirely or partially absent from my sight. (Like maybe I just see their tail...) This also happens with random parts of objects, like pieces of wall in my home, even though the entire build is locked. It's happened to several of my friends as well.

Here's an example, showing a 'missing' piece if wall.


Now the strange thing is, if I change my group setting, the missing stuff immediately shows up, like this:


That is how that piece of wall should look. And it is how everyone else in the room saw it, but me. Switching from one group to another, or switching and switching back again, fixes it almost instantly. Strange...

Are you using a Mac, by any chance? I've never seen that problem, buy my boyfriend uses a Mac Mini and runs into it all the time.

Yup. I use a Mac Mini. I suspect that it may in part be due to the built-in (and unfortunately non-upgradable) video card in the Mac Mini, which only has the SL-minimum-required amount of on-card memory. But I know other people who have seen this happen to themselves, and who I am pretty sure were not Mac users. So it's probably a function of how little on-card video memory a Player has.

It's getting to the point where when I log on, I just plan on switching my group affiliation back and forth. Whatever that does to affect this, it causes the missing people and stuff to rez, and makes almost all missing textures load a lot faster. Probably wouldn't hurt to flush my cache on every login, as well.

That one spot in my home seems particularly prone to showing this effect. Not at all sure why. My house-mate and most of our guests don't see it. But they all have more powerful video cards...

I get that problem in Windows, but only noticed it with avatars.

I saw it first in 1.7 with Avatars. Drove me crazy, logging off and back on again to see the people who were talking to me, until a friend mentioned the trick of switching your active group setting that snaps things back to normal.

With 1.8, it started affecting objects, like parts of buildings. Never saw it do that prior to 1.8, but the same work-around, of switching groups, fixed it.

I've been seeing this since 1.6, though only rarely, so it did happen before 1.7.