Freezing without stoping

Just today for no apparent reason I began having a strange problem.
It happens most often if I edit my appearance but it also seems to trigger if I stand still to long.

Everything in SL appears to be working as normal but it is frozen.
It is possible to type messages view history, move the camera around and so on as if SL were working normally however it is impossible to move or fly
Also nothing will update.
Any animation that were playing will continue to play, on avatar or on primes but no new messages will be receives. None of my messages seem to be sent. new animation will not begin old ones will not end. If you edit your appearance and save it is gone when you quit and log in again.
But despite SL apparently being disconnected it doesn’t crash or shut down. It just keeps running in this frozen state.
I’m not sure what caused this problem however not long before it started I uninstalled the demo of version 1.7 from my computer when I started getting messages that my hard drive was full. It turned out the Demo’s folder was over 40 GB in size!
Running the uninstaller fixed this immediately but shortly after this odd freezing problem started.
It also seems to trigger just when I log in on occasion
But I usually don’t get very far in the game even if I do manage to get in properly.
I really could use some advice on this.

Will uninstalling the current normal vershion of SL and reinstalling it have any damaging effects on my character or inventory in the game?

I'm not sure if doing an uninstall/reinstall will fix it. But is sound a lot like a connection problem or something blocking the data flow. It sounds like what you are experiencing is either a huge lag/packet/ping period or you momentarily lost your connection and it took a while for it to re-establish if at all. I have seen this similar effect when I'm playing Unreal Tournament and I loose connection to the server. The server sends updates to all current animations, positions and movement directions of all the actors seen. The client side will act continuously on this info until it receives new data from the server. Therefore animations continue to run and you can move your camera around but you cannot interact with anything because the server is not there to respond. SL could also be buffering the info to the cashe file for some reason and it just keeps getting bigger.

(Just had a thought, are both versions of SL using the same cashe? this may be the problem. If you haven't don so just try renaming the cashe file to force SL to create a new one. If this doesn't work you can restore the original cashe.)

I would do the simple check first of making sure your Internet connections are secure and the cables are in good shape. If the problem still persists, talk with your Internet provider tech. They can run some test from their end, which may uncover something. I don't think it's a problem with how you have SL setup or your drivers.

I was just thinking that doing this may affect your character and inventory. You should send this question to the SL support people.

You can uninstall and reinstall with no ill effects, in fact it's recomended in some cases.

I have this problem often, particularly over my WiFi connection, when my WAP router seems to reset. It seems that the earlier versions of the client would shut down or crash far more readily if they lost connection to the server - however the new client hangs around a lot longer (indefinitely??) without terminating. I think I prefer this - as soon as my WAP connection resumes, I get data flow again and can continue working where I was, without having to restart, teleport, fly to where I was and try to find the stuff I was building.