New SL update ruined SL for my computer!

So, i got the new update today and tried to sign on. SL was behaving badly from the minute i did. It seemed as if everything was taking FOREVER to download, and the framerate was horrible. I tried relogging and each time i relogged it got progressivley worse. I thought it may be my graphics drivers, so i updated them (ATI Mobility Radeon X300), and when i signed on again, i was able to connect to my home region, but everything was download at what seemed to be 1KB/minute. My screen is incredibly choppy and i can't search for anything, no results come up. I am wondering if this is a server problem or what. Please help!


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Here's an update on my problem:

I talked to live help on one of the few occasions where i could log in fully. They told me to reset my router, or try a full reinstall of SL.

I did both.

Neither worked.

Here are my issues when i log on to SL:

Takes about a full minute to connect to a region.
When i do finally connect, it says my clothes haven't finished downloading.
Then it says "unable to locate gesture at this time, please try again" in a little blue popup box at the bottom of my screen. These are constant, every time i sign in. Below are the variances between times i sign in:

this is where things get crazy...
Sometimes i get a gold or grey screen and the minimap shows i am in a strange place on the sim, like in the corner or something. When this happenes my coordinates go haywire, sometimes the height (Z) value will even go into the negative numbers, like the -300's... i didn't even know that was possible. During all of this time, i cannot move, talk, search, or load any stats about anything in SL (land stats, etc). But, people can talk to me it seems. I just cannot do anything. Also, I cannot see my avatar during this whole time.

Other times when i sign on, it loads the region up but seems to take forever and never finishes loading textures for the land around me. I can move, but it is extremely choppy. I can also talk to people but, like I said, the performance is horrible. Sometimes I can fly through walls at this point.

Something else that is strange is that there is a blob of semi-transparent squares in the middle of the sky. This is constant.

Everything was perfectly fine until i downloaded the update today...

Did your graphics preferences somehow get reset? This sounds like what happened to me when I tried maxing out the draw distance. That wasn't as bad an idea as contracting lockjaw on a dare. Anyway, I'd turn every graphics option on all three tabs off or all the way down, then turn off clouds and particles on the debug menu, and then (assuming that revives the interface) spending a while figuring out what's too expensive to turn on. You'll have to turn clouds and particles off every login if they're culprits on your card -- they were for me, until this update. I'm very, very happy with the update boost; I got about 5 sorely needed f/s on a low-end ati.

Thanks for the info, but i've tried all that. I updated my drivers to the best I can get. This managed to cut out most of the problems i was having, but still SL is just way to choppy to play. I dropped all the graphics options down to minimal, and it had NO effect on performance. I don't understand... I'm running on a dell inspirion 6000 with the ATI mobility radeon X300 and everything was fine before the update. In fact, i could have the graphics options almost all of the way up and not notice any kind of problem before the update. Maybe the new AGP option they put in the update is just incompatible with my set up? The AGP box is not greyed out anymore, but it does nothing for my preformance when i turn it on and off.. Actually now that i think about it, when i click on the AGP box, the sim music will start playing, even if i have the music on stop. Wierd. I don't know whats going on here but, whatever it is, the new update has ruined SL for me...

Finally fixed the issue. After I emailed my secondlife.log file to support, they told me my problems may be firewall related. So, I fixed the settings for my firewall and... problem solved! SL runs smooth as butter!

If anyone has strange problems like I had, check your firewall!

Still don't know what's up with that "sleeping" problem where my avatar sometimes goes in and out of away mode rapidly for a period of time.