Avatar Shading Help?

Is there anything I can do to fix this problem? (snapshot links below)

Avatars are getting very poorly shaded for some reason. I've tried turning on and off a lot of graphics settings and also updated my video card drivers.

I have a NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT.

Sorry for the excessively long links.

http://bp1.blogger.com/_lwTmYUKXJJk/RzudNP5kJoI/AAAAAAAAANQ/6u4ovSwesTY/s1600-h/Snapshot_116_sm.jpg
http://bp0.blogger.com/_lwTmYUKXJJk/RzudP_5kJpI/AAAAAAAAANY/aTlNuWTUTGU/s1600-h/Snapshot_117_sm.jpg
http://bp2.blogger.com/_lwTmYUKXJJk/RzudRf5kJqI/AAAAAAAAANg/c-1vPkAVMI4/s1600-h/Snapshot_118_sm.jpg

What are your all of your graphics settings set to?

And also, do you have the latest ForceWare driver installed?

Are you sure the avatar textures are loading fully? I was on earlier and noticed it was taking longer than usual to get out of that 'fuzzy' stage, presumably due to excessive server load.

Alternatively, is it possible you turned down the LOD slider for the avatar in graphics preferences?

Or maybe disabled ansiotropic filtering?

I do have the latest driver installed. My settings were on the High setting with the quality slider in preferences for those snapshots. I did some custom settings trying to see what would change it.

Anisotropic Filtering on and off didn't make a difference, nor did Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects in the Hardware Settings section.

The only thing that made avatars look almost normal was turning off Basic Shaders or turning off Atmospheric Shaders. I have a friend who is using the same graphics card and does not have this problem.

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 (Unknown model) (3192 MHz)
Memory: 3071 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 7600 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.1

I don't know what other information to give. Fixing this kind of thing definitely not my forte.

Definitely not because of textures not loading. The slider for avatar in graphics preferences is on maximum. No change with filtering on or off.

Also, I am trying to check Jira to see if there are related bugs and workarounds but I can't get it to load.

Now that I think of it, that banding effect looks familiar.

Are you using a custom resolution under your Nvidia Control Panel? I know my Viewsonic LCDTV has that very same color banding problem using a 1360 x 768 pixel resolution using a DVI cable.

Since I don't know how to set up a custom resolution I am going to venture a guess and say that I am not using a custom resolution. This problem occurs both in windowed mode and also in full screen mode, in which I was at a resolution of 1280x1024 which is the recommended resolution according to my monitor's documentation.