Getting locked out

The greatest nightmare I have about SL is that we can suddenly be locked out. It happened to my laptop which I had been happily using to run SL for months. After installing the latest client version: Kaboom! It is finished: It crashes after being logged in for a few seconds.
I was so lucky I had bought a brand new top-of-the-bill desktop system two weeks before that catastrophy, so now I can use that, but this makes me feel very insecure in my second life. I have invested hundreds of US$ in this game and one day I may no longer be able to reach it!
It happened to my SL-boyfriend this weekend: He logged out when he went to work and when he got back home he could no longer log in! "Second life cannot be accessed by this computer", he gets. And of course the support people are away for the weekend. He has invested even more into SL than I have and now it is all unreachable! And I cannot even give him a comforting hug, because he cannot log in.

What protection do we have to safeguard all that we paid for, all that we worked for and all our friends and aquaintances in SL? Does it happen that people get simply locked out and loose everything? I have seen several messages of people who were temporarely locked out on the forum, but none of these threads ends with a happy posting "it is solved now" nor with a sad "that's it I will be locked out for good".

Does it happen? Have people simply disappeared due to upgrades or bannings-by-mistake?

Personally, I would want to trust the business before investing a lot of money into it. That's why my spending on SL comes from my entertainment budget, and not my business budget.

The workers at Linden Labs may be good, nice, caring people. I don't know them personally. I do know that businesses react to problems that affect the bottom line. If Linden Labs maintains a good profit margin from an unreliable platform, it will remain unreliable.

In summary answer, second life is a very unsecure platform for business activities.

This scenario actually happened:

My friend was talking with a girl at a clothes shop when the owner of the store turned up and over-heard his somewhat flirtacious chat. Upon teleporting out he recieved an IM from the lady owner of the store saying she did not want him back to her store and she was sending an abuse report and an IM to Philip Linden about his inapropriate language he used on her land. The next day my friend was banned. His account was terminated and he lost everything because this bitch of a store owner exagerated the abuse report to such an extent.

Your account can be terminated at any time and for the silliest of reasons, believe me.

Im actually having a hard time with this one. From my understanding, the lindens can access any and all chat logs and would see if the complaint had merit or not if it was extreme enough for an account ban. Is it not true that if the lindens are going to Ban an account, they do a bit more detailed investigation such as looking at those chat logs? Anyone that has dealt with a situation like this and knows for sure care to shed a little light on that for me?

I agree I didnt know it was so easy to get banned ... I actually thought it was hard to ban even the really nasty and most abusive griefers . Isnt that why most people think abuse reports are useless? This lady must have connections or clout to get him banned so easily. It doesnt make any sense. I thought the only abuse reports linden took seriously were ones showing underage kids in the game?

Elinah

White - that happened to me too, my laptop could not run 1.14.0. Fortunately, after reading the Linden Blog, I found out I could re-download 1.13.2, which I did, and I was back to normal. My longterm solution was to update my video driver (I have a Gateway laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon X600). Now my laptop runs the lastest version fine.

Interestingly, the ATI website would not download any new drivers and referred me to the Gateway website, which had no new drivers . I ended up getting the latest drivers from a 3rd party site - www.techpsot.com

Good luck !!

I am getting the "Second Life can't be accessed from this computer" message tonight. Its really scary how bad Second Life is getting.

i am getting the "cannot access from this computer" message since last saturday.
the same message says "if i feel it is an error", please contact support.
Yes i feel it is a huge error, and yes i try contact suport all the time but i only have a dozen of auto-replies... looks like no living person takes care of the support mailbox.

Some of the easist fixes arent always the right fixes, but a few I've tried when having issues. Uninstalling and reinstalling SL. Checking to make sure I have the most recent video drivers for my graphics card. Doing other clean up on my machine etc. Cant beleive the amount of pure junk that ends up on this thing doing whatever it pleases. Good thing I married a computer geek, saves me tons of money

Good luck to all unable to get in!

I left a message with support on the phone and they solved it for me. I did all the re-install, clear cache stuff..this was about having the IP address of my computer blocked and only SL can cure that. Luckily nothing wrong with my account and I could log in on another computer.

So call the 800 number and leave a detailed message. It worked for me (well I think it did cause now it works).

toll 800 only for USA, Canada, UK and Australia.