Very mysterious, recurring crash.

Hello guys, recently, I've been having issues running Second life, both the first look viewer and the original flavor. The problem is that I'll be doing... anything in SL, and all of a sudden every single thing on my computer locks up, including the mouse. The computer then makes a beep sound (from the MoBo speaker) and will be unresponsive to any input, at which point I have to shut the system down and reboot. This error seems to be completely random, as sometimes it will happen a couple of seconds after login, or a couple of hours. I can't reproduce it in any reliable way, and it only seems to happen when I use SL, despite various stress tests with programs like Photoshop, Neverwinter Nights 2, and F.E.A.R. What do you guys think the problem is? I'm at wit's end, here.

These are my specs:

Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 1024MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Video Card: Radeon X1950 Pro

Have you tried updating your hardware's drivers in the device manager? Someone else in this forum had a similar problem and they said that fixed it. Lots of people are having problems with the Second Life viewers freezing up on them including me. 1.13.3(2) If I wait anywhere from 3 seconds to 1 minute the program starts responding again. I can usually force the program to close though and still have access to other applications on my machine if it stays locked up for too long.

Oh my, I just did another test on a hunch and I think I figured it out. I turned on a PCprobe and started up SL, and as I wandered around I noticed that my CPU was heating up very rapidly. After a while I panicked and shut it down, because temperatures got up to 87 degrees Celcius (!!!). Would an overheating CPU cause the entire system to crash like it does? My new fan is in the mail.

Most definitely. If you are reaching those temperatures, you are lucky nothing has been ruined. The MB beep was probably from the motherboard sensing that it was overheating and so shutting down. I know that my MB has a feature like that.