Sea causes massive FPS drop

On EVERY viewer and EVERY sim and EVERY driver: when I am near the sea (Linden water) my FPS drops dramatically from about 30 fps to 9. This occurs at exactly the same intervals: 20 seconds good, then 10 seconds bad, then 20 good, 10 bad etcetera. This happens since about 1,5 weeks and occurs on the latest regular viewer and on the RC's.

Obviously it seems like a graphics card (driver) issue. So I cleaned my driver with DriverSweeper (Guru3D), installed the (old) driver from cd-rom that came with my graphics card and upgraded to Nvidia's latest recommended driver 169.25_forceware_winvista_32bit_international_whql

It got a little better after the driver sweep and renewal. But still, whenever I'm close to the ocean my fps drops at these crazy steady intervals. I have also cleared chache (of course), made sure that my pc is free of any spyware (AdAware, Hijack This, LiveOneCare) and cleaned and defragmented my harddisc. My pc is also free of dust, so I don't think the graphics card runs too hot.

Crazy shit, this. I can't figure it out. When I want to make a movie in sl, the recording also stutters like hell. Does that have to do something with it? Is my graphics card insufficient or just broke? Guys, really need some help here!

My specs:

Second Life 1.19.1 (4) Apr 2 2008 11:59:37 (Second Life Release)

You are at 186239.0, 286098.4, 23.4 in Symfurny located at sim5850.agni.lindenlab.com (8.2.35.152:12035)
Second Life Server 1.21.1.86182

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (1804 MHz)
Memory: 2046 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista (Build 6000)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 7600 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.14911 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 0/679 (0.0%)
Viewer Digest: bb2966f6-cf81-a0de-1e21-dcd21f05428a

Oh my goodness... I fried my graphics card. Had nothing to do with sl but only with the fact that I didn't clean my pc interior frequently enough. All fans/ventilators gathered too much dust (yeah I smoke too, hey I'm European!). That caused my graphics card to get too hot and it simply refused to do any more work.

I'm posting this, so others might know that it is not ALWAYS drivers/software issues with sl. Sometimes stuff just gets broken. Yeah yeah, and don't say: smoking is bad for you... pffffff.

Oh, by the way, I installed a brand new 8600GT Nvidia card which works great!

*makes a mental note to add "check the inside of your puter for dust bunnies" to future troubleshooting suggestions*

Glad you figured it out, Paulo . Very obscure solution .

clap clap

Lol, yes I tried everything else