SL randomly freezing/crashing

As a test? Lets face it, if you can't eliminate the wireless aspect of your network to troubleshoot you can't elimintate or confirm it as the problem. According to the Lindens, wireless networks, even with a wired connection to that computer is one of their biggest support headaches they encounter. I suggest hooking straight to the modem and verify, its a basic step in troubleshooting. I had two brand new routers from two different makers verified as bad (frequent drops, freezing, etc) right out of the box.

You need to ensure you have the latest motherboard chipset drivers for your specific motherboard and sound chip, since you are unsure what your motherboard is, getting correct drivers from the motherboad maker is going to be tough.

Well, I tested the program using my laptop and it ran fine. My laptop is running on a wireless connection as well.

I can't check the motherboard chipsets right now, because my PC is in the middle of a defrag.

Edit: Defrag finished.

Edit 2: Drivers not updated (they were already up to date.)

Have you installed the latest BIOS update for your board? I note that BIOS 1007 fixes stability issues with AGP 4x boards, and 1009 is billed as improving compatibility with ATI Radeon cards.

Yes, as previously stated (although admittedly badly worded), that's up to date.

Today I upgraded my computer, after having similar problems, on and off. I was running a 950 MB and chip, 256 ram, and a GF FX 5700LE. Now, with an Athlon XP MB, about 700 ram, and the same vid card, I am now able to check the Shiny and Bumpmapping options in Prefs for the first time, and have only crashed once, due to the sim itself I was in crashing. Maybe an upgrade is the only option, if you run a slower system. I am very happy with mine, I can tell you

I attached to the process and debugged the SecondLife.exe module during one of these freezes. You know what was really interesting? It's the exact same peice of code that was causing the client to freeze during the login process last week. There are 43 instructions where it gets stuck in an infinite loop.

My bet is that it's a networking issue. Something happens that causes the app to drop to this loop and, BOOM!, your system appears to instantly freeze.

I forwarded the code to them, along with a memory dump, register values, and my network settings. Support is taking an average of 10 days to reply to any of my e-mails, and of the ones I've received, they've all been trying to identify the issue on my end - EVEN THOUGH I SENT THEM A PEICE OF CODE STUCK IN AN INFINITE LOOP.

The most recent response was that they think something is wrong with a router at my ISP (ComCast). NO router issue should cause an app to enter an infinite loop. Is anyone else rolling their eyes?

Hmm, I don't have any other suggestions in that case. If you're all up to date, it should be fine. Try contacting the Lindens. They have much better stats on possible fixes than I do. I've known people with similar hardware configurations as yours, and it does work.

Here is something else I encountered not long ago. Call your cable company's support and have them look at the signal strength to the modem and for the number of signal drops. I found I had a cable splitter go bad and was intermittantly dropping the signal to the modem. Removed the splitter and problem went away.

I did that a while back. I now have all new wiring, a new router, and new cable modem, a new splitter, and a brand-spanking new amplifier. My signal to noise ratio is a very healthy 33:1.

The reality of it is this. SL obviously has a bug that results in an infinite loop; regardless of the cause, this should be fixed. ComCast (my cable provider) obviously has a problem in that they keep dropping my connection throughout the day; regardless of the application, this should not happen.

I am receiving radically different support experiences from both.

Comcast is actually sending people to my home, installing amplifiers, routing wires, testing my equipment, and sending engineers to review the infrastructure in my area - free of charge (and, according to their technician, there are only three people using cable Internet in my area, so this is costing THEM a ton of money as their is no economy of scale). Comcast is doing everything within reason to assure the problem is not on their end.

SL keeps pointing the finger at others instead of explaining to me why they think the code-snippet I sent isn't the problem. Beyond writing me e-mails every few days, I have no indication that anything has been done on their end. Heck, I'd appreciate it if they look at the code snippet and tell me that it's not even part of SL, it's code from a DLL or a driver that SL is loading; at least I would know exactly where to look.

I pulled up DJ's support request (someone else has been working on it). It's been awhile since I've seen low-level instructions (I studied CompSci in college, but I'm not a programmer here). Since the instructions you sent appear to be lower-level instructions, based on code written in a high-level language and run through a compiler, I'm not entirely sure what actual code is being run (and, therefore, who to ask about it).

Second Life does take all available CPU time while running; there aren't any idle commands thrown in in order to report a lower CPU utilization. That much is normal.

If you're using an ATI card, there's a good chance that a small hiccup in SL is causing the ATI "VPU Recovery" to kick in and disable 3D. Theoretically, this can prevent a runaway program from locking up the whole computer, but like many "crash recovery" utilities, a flawed assumption that the program has locked up may cause the recovery utility to actually crash the program...

I disabled the VPU recovery and I have yet to freeze-up! So I enabled it, and within about 20 seconds I was dead-in-the-water. In my opinion, I think you've nailed it!

Given that the VPU Recovery kicks in when the driver stops responding to the system, its timeout period was probably short enough to be triggered when SL was waiting for a network or disk cache request. There must be some connection inside SL that briefly hangs a blocking thread during the render process during these pauses.

Nice catch! Thanks!

Where do you disable VPU recovery, I think Im having a similar problem and would like to try that out.

You can only do it if you have an ATI card. Here's how to do it:

Right-click on your desktop.
Click "Settings" > "Advanced" > "SMARTGART".
Make sure "VPU recovery" is disabled.
Click "OK".

Well, I disabled this VPU recovery, but it didn't solve anything. I still experienced another lockup within about 5 mintues of play.

I've been having this same problem for awhile now.. even before the login problems (about a week before that is when it started)
It used to run fine.. then one day it started freezing up and has gotten worse since the login problem.
I have a top of the line machine, with a great video card and have my SL settings down to the lowest they can go on EVERYTHING... and I still freeze up!
One other thing I noticed when this happens is that my FPS and Bandwith will be in a normal range then *freeze* then drop down drastically.. then right back up to normal.. also, the bars at the top right pretty much stay red or yellow most of the time, regardless of where I'm at.
As far as the mouse not moving.. I can move my mouse... but the program stops responding, and then causes other programs to do the same and I can't even shut down normally at that point and have to just cold boot from the machine itself.
This doesn't happen with any other program other than SL either, I've tried uninstalling it and reinstalling, reinstally over itself also... nothing works.
I'm at a loss.