Offline building environment

I would really love to see an offline environment, in which you can use the SL tools to create objects and upload them into the main game. Usually whilst building in second life, constant sim crashes and resets mean that on unlucky days I can lose upwards of two hours work. Also, due to the lag present everywhere in second life it's unecessarily difficult to build things due to object rubber-banding, having to wait (sometimes for 3 or more minutes) if you want to change the color or texture of a complex object and the constant sim resets. If there was an offline environment that allowed you to upload your creations, it would make learning to build and creating new products that little bit easier and seems a far more sensible alternative to buying an entire simulator to be free from the effects of the non-stop sandbox griefing or people running scripts that lag you on your land.

Yeh, just a sandbox sim with no access to the asset server except to "import" or "export" objects you have full permissions for (for the usual upload fee per texture/anim/...).

I get the impression though that the sims are a tottery and fragile collection of scripts, open source tools, closed source tools, and the only way to make it work would be to package the whole thing up in a VMWARE instance running the right version of Linux... and even an "empty" sim would be a humungous download.

Based on the Command Line Options you could try using -local (run without the simulator/server).
Don't think you'd be able to upload though :-\

And looking over the list I found another one to start using, "-noinvlib" doesn't load the Lirbrary!

/8/64/110607/1.html

This is a pretty nice tool...the author did a great job with it (and it's written in Python ).