Dissapearing Login Screen/ failed vis

When I open Secondlife in Win XP (sp2), I see the title bar, the minimize and close buttons, the border *around* the window and... nothing else. The desktop still shows, but nothing happens. I hear a chug from the hd just like on normal SL load, and can even hit enter and *log in* (checked with wife's comp... I'm online and visible). I can minimize, and pop it back up, and still all I see is desktop through the secondlife window, with the window's border and title bar.

Rebooting usually fixes this, and I can go about my business. But I'm getting sick of rebooting if/when everytime this acts up (it never goes away without reboot otherwise).

I'm running an AMD athalon 1.6 (1.4 gHz) with 1024 ram, and probably most related,
an ATI Radeon 9600 (256). The fan on the card proper broke (cheap!!!), but has a cooling card/fan in the slot right next to it. I installed the latest ATI drivers yesterday, which of course required restart, so of course it seemed fine for the time. But today, here I am again. I also wonder if its not related to doing a screen refresh/rate change or something on this particular monitor (also got latest drivers: Dell e771p monitor). Anyhow, I'm at a loss for the time being, and wanted to know if anyone else has heard of such a problem or has any ideas. Thanks!

-Seph DaSilva

PS, another clue is that in the 'ATI Catalyst control center', the '3d preview' window behaves just like the SL window... desktop showing through/nothing there.

Edit: Another factor is that I had been running 2 monitors, but gave one up in favor of real desktop space! I'd had the DVI as the primary with an adapter to the Dell monitor, and the vga port as secondary. When I cut down to one monitory, I had the dell on the vga port. Now I've just switched teh dell *back* to the DVI port this evening in a troubleshooting effort, but that required a restart, and of course I can't knowingly induce this problem so.. I have to wait and see if it happens again. *also* (sorry), I poked Quake2 (yes, I still have it installed and like it ) and found that since it is Open GL, it similarly will not display when the problem is active.

you said that the fan on the actual video card is not working, that fan you have in another slot may not be providing adequate cooling for the chip on the card, this may be your problem, as the card may be overheating, and not initializing properly.