Shiny, then not shiny!

Recently I was finally able to enable shiny without killing my already meager framerate. I was having a good ole time looking at things that I thought were flat colors turn out to actually be shiny, and then I hopped over to the FN SkyMall to pick up a nice dragon avatar that a friend has. I get back home and wear my new avatar, switching between colors and such....and suddenly the shiny dark blue scales turn to a nasty pale color with no shine! Prims flicker between shiny and this weird flat color on ALL objects, anywhere, not just this avatar or in my home sim. What's going on??

I was going to post a picture, but for some reason it won't let me. So much for pictures being worth a thousand words.