I am still getting the same symptoms that has been mentioned in this opening ticket. I am using an HP Pavilion Laptop running Vista and the NVidia driver set. Although this symptom has substantially reduced in frequency in V 1.20.5 vs the older RC's, it is still happening. I am thinking that the related freeze/nofreeze cycling that seems to preceed this crash is related to the fact that for laptop NVidia drivers, the integrated chipset controls video and network. Just a guess.

I am hoping this is the new ISSUE ID that Periapse Linden is now following.

If the LL teams wants me to try something... send me an IM or leave me a comment here and I will help as soon as I come check here for updates to this issue ( I do not get atuo email notifications so IMing me is the most effective).

Toy

criteria: Windows Vista, nvidia graphics, 1.20 rc viewer
key symptoms:

• Intermittent freezes
• Vista message about "driver stopped responding and has recovered".
• eventually machine hangs

For others reading/voting on this JIRA
If your environment matches the criteria and you observe the listed symptoms, please comment with your environment details (cut/paste from Help / About Second Life), the viewer version you are using (please use 1.20.6 release candidate), and your nvidia driver version.

Please ensure that you have the latest nvidia drivers.
For many this is the forceware 169.25 from December.
I, however, use a GeForce Beta driver in my home Vista box: 174.74 from March. I did this for a game I bought last month. Though I was leery of using a beta graphics card, it fixed the game (Bioshock) and I've never experienced this driver instability on my machine.
Also please note if you are using one of the Omega series drivers. Just trying to gather data...

Thanks!

I just install all the latest Vista drivers - including the latest NVidia Driver. I also upgraded to RC6. I hoped many the latest NVidia driver would fix it. Well withing 10 minutes I went to help island and after standing there 5 minutes my screen freaky by flickering at me wildly for about 15 seconds then I got the video driver not responding error then crashed. A report log seems to have been sent to LL at 18:51 CDT.

I logged in again to the same place at help island. As soon as i logged in the exact failure happened again. the failure seemed to log up to LL again.

The latest NVidia driver I just upgraded to is....

Release Date: 2008-03-25 Version: 7.15.11.7432 A

I have an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
and using Vista (NO SP1 INSTALLED) with all patches installed.

Toy

here is a first..... I crashed with the same flickering screen and the video driver not responding while using my 1.19.4 viewer. That is the first time with version 1.19.

Things are much worse with the latest NVidia driver!!!! grrrrr

I am having a feeling that because I was much more stable with my older NVidia driver then I am now, maybe the LL developers have older or legacy Nvidia graphics comments embedded into the viewer that the new drivers are crashing on when they receive these older / conflicting commands.

what I would really like to know is if there are any SL users with Nvidia cards and much older graphics drivers and if they are encountering any of these issues. If my theory is correct, those users with older graphics cards and outdated drivers (I am sure there are lots out there - I have just asked a SL friend how old her nvidia card and driver is - she never has these problems) will not crash - even with the newer RC viewer because the older code in the newer viewers wont clash with their older drivers/command sets.

Just a thought!

Toy

(PS - I edited my earlier post because I thought I had upgraded to SP1 of Vista - but in fact I have not).

old coding instructions clashing with newer Nvidia drivers?

NVidia Driver version: 7.15.11.6925

Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 20:43:54 (Second Life Release Candidate)

You are at 276571.4, 297807.5, 24.5 in Rangitoto located at sim7162.agni.lindenlab.com (8.10.144.164:13001)
Second Life Server 1.21.1.86182 ####Happened at this location###

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz)
Memory: 3070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista (Build 6000)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8800 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.15020 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 50/11207 (0.4%)

I have had this problem ever since a few days after the first "dazzle" viewer was released. My environment: (it is Vista 64bit)

Second Life 1.19.1 (4) Apr 2 2008 11:59:37 (Second Life Release)
You are at 260798.9, 235118.1, 749.2 in Glenmore located at sams-pc (127.0.0.1:58304)
Second Life Server 1.21.1.86182
CPU: AMD (Unknown model) (3214 MHz)
Memory: 4094 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600 GTS/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.15035 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 865/224178 (0.4%)
Viewer Digest: bb2966f6-cf81-a0de-1e21-dcd21f05428a

As I mentioned, since upgrading my laptop to the latest Nvidia driver, both my RC6 and my 1.19.4 viewer were crashing constantly.

In frustration, I went back to the advanced graphics parameters and disabled the ATMOSPHERIC SHADERS

Ever since disabling it, I have not crashed with eith client all night and for 2 hours today. I should have crashed many times already. Disabling that parameter so far has stopped the video driver crashing.

I will keep trying with this setting diabled on the new RC6

Toy!

You are at 288803.3, 280419.2, 443.2 in Synister located at sim4848.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.27.59:12035)
Second Life Server 1.21.1.86182

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2493 MHz)
Memory: 4094 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600M GS/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.15055 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 11/165746 (0.0%)

Driver Version (from HP) 7.15.11.7432 - currently

I have tried 2 SL Clients and two sets of driver from HP.... all crash me to a blue screen of death with the message at the top IRQL_IS_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL... I could probably quote most of the rest of the page I have seen it so often

I;m due a crash... I had better hit the add button

At first, all is well, but after a while, the client starts freezing for short intervals; the freezes start to happen more and more often as time goes on.

Configuration:

Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 19:36:48 (Second Life Release Candidate)

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5400+
Memory: 3905 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.24-16-rt #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Thu Apr 10 14:04:43 UTC 2008 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 169.12
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.15085 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)

I used the new client again for several hours yesterday and near the end of the night I encountered 1 "video driver not responding" error which although it was disappointing, the number of video driver crashes after turning off the atmospheric shading is almost like it stopped.

To show if it truly is that parameter - today I will re-enable the parameter and see if the crashing starts up again.

Toy

Thank you, Periapse, for your attention to this

News: We are holding off the release of 1.20 viewer. Instead we decided to merge the thread watchdog into this branch and do a few more revs of RC to try to bring down the crash rate. The thread watchdog is new, and will likely take a couple tries to perfect, but it will allow us to gain some insight on when other threads fail. The particular "driver stopped responding" problems should be detected by the watchdog, which will give us a call stack.

Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 20:43:54 (Second Life Release Candidate)

You are at 261719.0, 256687.1, 525.5 in Skiddaw located at sim5390.agni.lindenlab.com (8.2.33.137:13001)
Second Life Server 1.21.1.86182

CPU: AMD (Unknown model) (2211 MHz)
Memory: 2047 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8500 GT/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.15126 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 1/4325 (0.0%)

SL was once again highly unstable last night with the Asset Server problem after 9:30pm but I for as long as i was able to stay logged in - I did not get a "video driver crash" subsequent to disabling the Atmospheric Shader.

When is the RC with the thread watchers code going to be released?

Toy

For those of you who use nvidia's own drivers, or those who wish to abandon your OEM drivers and try nvidia's latest: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_175.16_whql.html
This driver, version 175.16, was released yesterday. Anecdotal evidence suggests it fixes the driver instability reported here. Also, I had replaced my Dell driver on my home Vista machine with an earlier beta version of this GeForce driver and I never saw this instability.

If you do download this driver, please check the product compatibility tab first, and if you are replacing your OEM's driver with the GeForce one, check to see if your OEM will still support that configuration. Some OEMs put users in a bind by not supporting any drivers other than their own, but yet don't update drivers frequently enough to fix identified bugs. Of course, you can always revert to an OEM driver if you need to.

Unfortunately for us users that have Laptops with motherboard integrated video chipsets and drivers, we do not have the option of using the NVidia generic drivers. as was just clipped right from the NVidia support page...

"The GeForce M series and GeForce Go series notebook GPUs use drivers that have been customized by the notebook manufacturers to support hot key functions, power management functions, lid close and suspend/resume behavior. NVIDIA has worked with some notebook manufacturers to provide notebook-specific driver updates, however, most notebook driver updates must come from the notebook manufacturer. Additionally, the desktop GeForce graphics drivers will not install on Geforce M series and Quadro M series notebook GPU's."

We must rely upon the OEMs to release these drivers. The thing is that the OEMs might be behind NVidia in releasing their customized versions of the drivers (in the case for HP - their latest driver is from February), BUT and this is a big BUT.... application developers - specially gaming and online applications that have intensive use of the graphics resource on a PC should have policies in their development that restrict the use of any new command sets that have been released within a period that would not allow the vast majority of OEMs to integrate these new features or commands.

LL development in this case should not have included the use of commands that are so new to NVidia that the OEMs have not deployed them. I think LL shoudl take the position that STABILITY trumps NEW FEATURES. I would rather have a SL viewer that may be missing a couple of new/cool features but is rock solid stable.

From my short period of time as a SL resident and as a person in the enterprise IT industry, I have gotten the impression that LL still is holding of culture of being wrapped up in "WHATS COOL" and has not matured to a stage in their evolution where Quality Service and Stability are as important. You can easily see this evidence in how many new viewers and features and upgrades are being released. A new viewer and upgraded functional products are released way to quick - which generates the clear outcomes of the numerous Grid instabilities and viewer bugs etc that the residents of SL have to suffer with.

I hope that LL moves to their next phase of company maturity which focuses on providing their customers a stable environment and quality service levels more so than trying to glitz everyone with the latest cool feature / viewer.

Summary... get rid of an graphics based features that use graphics command less than 1 year old.

Just my thoughts on this!

Toy

Last night this happened to me 4 times in the span of about 20 minutes.

I've tried to submit crash reports when possible, but the crash reporter's not working and even if it is, when I have to power off/on, I'm sure the stack info is gone when it does work upon running SL again.

It definitely seems to be a function of texture load/moving the camera through avatar movement or flycam.

in the meantime.... is it coincidence that I have never had one of these crashes while running on battery? Or has someone an explanation? I have the power settings so that the screenisn;t as bright, blahblahblah...... (now that I have typed this i just know I will be eating my words)

Coincidentally, this seems to have happened at the same time I had to run a registry patch program to reset and recover the drivers for my Optiarc DVD RW AD-7201S5 drive that came as part of the original setup. The machine is just over a week in my hands. Since there's some other oddness happening here, I do wonder if the patch didn't also do something to the drivers. Will update this if a review of drivers and cabling changes things markedly.

I had been getting a similar heap crash documented in the appropriate Jira issues, and the same error messages crop up here too as the issue resolves itself. In my case Vista does manage to recover from these crashes more or less smoothly.

re jeaniesing trilling's comments, my rig is also a fairly new HP Pavilion Media Center m8430f desktop machine. As a desktop hopefully the NVIDIA GeForce drivers from NVIDIA will be compatible and hopefully clear up what the registry changes seem to have uncovered for me.

Also, I just now discovered that, at least with SL running, the NVIDIA Control Panel also has a tendency to crash.

Sysinfo from followup login:

Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 20:43:54 (Second Life Release Candidate)

You are at 286240.8, 265509.9, 102.6 in Huineng located at sim5839.agni.lindenlab.com (8.2.35.141:12035)
Second Life Server 1.21.1.87495

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2399 MHz)
Memory: 4095 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8500 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.15247 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 0/2693 (0.0%)

Have you considered removing NVidia from the list of recommends? Or perhaps a warning to those who would purchase machines similar to ours that are having problems? My sole purpose for purchasing this model, this machine, was SL... and on the advice of the page listing system requirements. I feel as though Periapse's last post disavows any LL responsibility for the crashing issue, and definitely feel as though I have been misled into buying an incompatible video card/machine....

if nothing else, saying on the secondlife page that HP is not recommended at this time MIGHT fuel then to fix the available drivers...

The bigger issue is how the viewers slowly consume memory real and then I think the virtual until near the end of the night a RELOG is required (as the system become horrendously lagging and freezes) where I can see my hard drive run constantly for a couple minutes immediately after the logout (I have concluded it is the system dumping the cache or virtual memory). But this issue is being tracked on another Jira (mind you not actively).

But again, for me on this issue, I am hoping that an upcoming release of the Viewer will find the root cause to the NVidia driver problem so that I can re enable the atmospheric shader and not worry about NVidia driver related instability.

And I do hope LL rethinks their policy on OEM drivers not being something they should seriously consider when developing and deploying new functions and features. It would be a true sign of an IT company's maturity toward a more rock solid and stable service offering and product to its customers.

Cheers!!!

Toy

Those of you not saddled with OEM drivers should definitely update to the May 13th nvidia driver. I started using it when it was still beta (my Dell XPS Vista box at home) and I have never had any crashing or hanging.

Toy, and others at the mercy of Dell, HP, etc: The devs working on the render pipeline do not use any card specific, recently added, functionality. For the reasons you mention they try to go for basic OGL functionality. If certain hardware gives advantages, it is presented with a Preferences switch to turn it off/on. In particular, I know of no new card functionality being utilized between the 1.19.1.4 release viewer and the 1.20 series.

Instead, I think this is a result of simple bugs in the nvidia drivers, which some render pipeline changes in 1.20 exposed. NVidia has been bug fixing ever since they released those famously broken GeForce drivers for the launch of Vista. The newest drivers are finally compatible with the current crop of hot games. But OEM vendors typically expect that video drivers are stable, and only rev them rarely. This strategy just doesn't work for the Vista nvidia drivers. They need to change their policy and start matching the nvidia releases. We have contacts at HP, Dell, Apple and are doing our best to inform them of problems and get them to update their drivers.

Jeaniesing – thanks for writing to HP about the drivers. If/when we actually find a card and OEM where SL will not run at all, or crashes consistently, we do indeed list it as not supported: http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php. We also allow residents the ability to add personal experiences with certain hardware: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Graphics_Cards#Personal_experiences
I recommend that you disable atmo shaders for now (or go back to the release client) while we continue to research this crash.

The new viewer rc7 comes out tomorrow. It features the thread watchdog which we hope will (a) turn freezes and hangs that typically now force a reboot into ordinary crashes and (b) give us thread specific information on that crash.

My shaders and imposters have been off for the duration... I moved from the regular client to the RC after reading the earlier jira thread that implied there were fixes in the RC. There are times when i will go several hours with no problems, but yesterday, not so much. I was in for 5 minutes and crashed out of Vista, logged back in to finish the conversation and crashed before anything had rezzed... twice..... logged in again and crashed after a few minutes... then gave up and pulled out my old machine to access SL and finish the conversation.

In addition to feeling duped by the LL recommendations, I agree with Toy in feeling 'left behind' by Linden Labs and questioning, for the first time, the professionalism of the company. I wonder how many folks with OEM drivers, and without a vested interest in the game, have simply given up without even realizing the jira exists.

I hope I don't muddy the waters, but I have seen what I believe is this same crash a couple of times with XP on my home PC

• the display driver hangs and XP sends an error message and shuts down the application. I also (very commonly) get a (slightly different) hang with a Visual C++ Runtime Error and Viewer crash as noted in VWR-2095 - see my comment http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2095?focusedCommentId=61344#action_61344

I agree that it seems to be a Driver issue; I have tried lots of different ones, I think I found that one of the older ones was more stable (will check version when I get home - maybe 169.73?) but am looking forward to trying the new one Periapse mentions above, and the new RC when it comes out today.

Toysoldier: "I would really like to know is if there are any SL users with Nvidia cards and much older graphics drivers and if they are encountering any of these issues" - GeForce 6600LE and 169.73 - and yes!

My specs:
CPU: AMD K7 (Unknown model (custom build)) (1143 MHz)
Memory: 2.5 Gb
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
2nd Life Version: All - from 1.18.3.5 / Nicholaz BE-S to 1.19.x ,1.20.x RC and Nicolaz EC (latest)

Last night I had another NO CRASH night (7hours straight) with my OEM's NVidia driver from HP for my 8400M GS video card and with the Atmospheric Shaders disabled and running on Vista SP1. I dont know if that helps anyone else, but it surely seems to have been the factor to prevent the NVidia crashes (only happened a couple times in days).

Once the new 1.20.7 is released and I install it, I will remove the atmospheric shading and allow myself to crash.

Thanks Periapse for the explanation on the NVidia drivers and the OEM issue and I hope LL puts a lot of pressure on HP. I think I will call HP Suppoort and log a call myself so it can be recorded in their system.

It is strange though Periapse that you mention that no new graphic card functionality has been released in the 1.20.x viewers from the more stable 1.19.x releases and yet the NVidia problems for me started showing up when I used the 1.20.x viewer (that was until I upgraded my HP OEMed NVidia drivers - then even the 1.19.4 viewer started crapping out much more and both were worse).

Anyway, to all you voters and watchers with OEM graphic cards - CALL YOUR VENDOR and register a support call on this video driver. Tell them you need to have them upgrade it to the latest General releaeed NVidia driver.

Cheers!

Toy

Since then RC7 won't even load without crashing and the public release client is now also crashing with the same video error.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz)
Memory: 3070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista (Build 6000)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8800 GT/PCI/SSE2

Absolute... if you have a desktop which from the model of graphics processor makes me think you are, then Periapse is suggesting that you might use the fgraphics driver offered right from NVIDIA that was released only a week or two ago. It is suppose to fix the bug. Worst case is that you can re-install the older driver if this latest NVidia driver causes grief. The experience you encountered that has even extended to 1.19.4 was extactly happened to me - until I turned off my atmospheric shadding.

AS FOR ME...

Two nights ago I installed the latest RC of 1.20.7 but I have not yet re-enabled the Atmospheric Shading to see if I will crash. I have not crashed with it disabled.

I DID find a new bug related to the 1.20.7 which maybe Periapse can pass on to the developers.. and which has been so annoying that I switched back to the 1.19.4 version...

The public chat has lost all the Cariage Return and Line Feeds behind your chat entries. This causes the next public chat line to append immediately after the last character of the line you submitted. when I went back to 1.19.4 the problem went away. Example of what it looks like to me in chat:

Toysoldier Thor: HI THERE HOW ARE YOU?Periapse Lindon
: I AM DOING FINE!

I would have to assume that this little new bug will have been caught very quickly since its so annoying and visible.

Tonight I will re enable the atmospheric Shading and see how it goes - if the crashing starts again.

Cheers!

Toy

Good news is that it seemed to have sent a CRASH LOG every time so you Developers should have a lot of evidence of the crashes from me. I am sure you can search through all the crash logs you receive to find the ones from me.

GOOD LUCK!

PS - I think I am going to uninstall and reinstall my RC8 as I cannot get rid of that annoying public chat bug losing linefeeds unless I go to the older veiwer.

CHEERS!

Toy

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (3000 MHz)
Memory: 3327 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 9800 GTX/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.15619 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)

Nvidia Driver Version: 175.16
CPU is a Core 2 Duo E8200
i'm using 4 Gigs of Ram

its still crashing

edit: looks like DISABLING the atmospheric shading prevents the crashing - SL runs now smooth
edit2: SL runs for 2 1/2 hours stable, crashed then 2 times

give it up... the atmospheric shaders are not the problem, if you turn them off anf have a run of good luck you get all sorts of false hope... then you crash and will crash again.

My only false hope is that LL will release an old version so that I don't crash.....

....or that HP will actually update the drivers before 2008 ends.

as jeaniesing trilling said, if you have luck then it runs for 3 hours and more
and sometimes it crashes all 5 minutes....

only Second Life 1.19.0 (5) Feb 28 2008 17:18:12 (Second Life Release) is the last one which is stable for me ...
if someone needs a link to 1.19.0 (5) then ask me please ingame.....

With NVIDIA drivers 169.25 then the driver appears to crash and recovers.
With NVIDIA drivers 175.16 then the screen goes blank and the PC effectively crashes and has to be reset.

In both cases it is within 5 minutes, but usually MUCH sooner. SL is effectively unusable and has been for several weeks.
I have tried running in a Window and Full screen.
I have tried reducing the graphics settings to low.

I will attach a zip file containing DXDIAG output and Secondlife log files from a 169.25 crash.

NB - When 175.16 drivers were first released the English version appeared to install but didn't actually update the driver. You can check by openning the NVIDIA control panel and clicking "System Information" in the bottom left corner. Solution is to re-download the driver and reinstall. (They appear to have replaced the English version with a corrected International version.)

if the driver crashes only SL crashes but WoW keeps running ...

maybe you can implement some restart-engine-if-it-crashes-function like in WoW ...

...

at least i'm still running 175.16 because all the older driver-versions dont support my 9800 Gtx

...

1.19.0.4 = no crashes
1.19.1.5 = crashes
1.20.8.0 = crashes
1.20.9.0 = crashes

NB -
For me crash is always within 5 minutes.
As this bug affects 1.19.1.4 and 1.20.10.0 I do NOT have a working SL client.
Therefore for me this is a 100% show stopper.

please try the 175.12 betadrivers from nvidia

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_175.12.html

i have a guess and want to test if its correct...

my 1.20.9.10 runs for over 5 hours with these drivers

I'll look at the info you've submitted today, in case I can glean anything. Have you tried disabling atmospheric shaders?

I have tried it on several versions of the browser including 1.19.0 (5) that was successful on others' machines. I cannot update drivers as it is a laptop...

Some things I learnt along the way...

A stable PC browsing the Internet <> a stable PC running 3D games.

I used a utility called "FurMark" which uses Open GL to draw a large rotating fur coloured ring. Yes that's wierd but it does a good job at exercising the PC + graphics card and it also tests the Open GL drivers at least in a limited way. I suggest anyone having stability problems first proves that their PC is stable by running this for 1+ hours. If the PC doesn't survive this test without crashing then you can rule out SL and you have a repeatable test to diagnose issues. (I know - 1+ hours away from SL. But remember, you have to sleep, the computer doesn't. )

When 175.16 drivers were first released the English version appeared to install but didn't actually update the driver. You can check by openning the NVIDIA control panel and clicking "System Information" in the bottom left corner. Solution is to re-download the driver and reinstall. (They appear to have replaced the English version with a corrected International version.)

Diagnosing an unstable system is a nightmare because you have to keep swapping components until the problem goes away. I bought a 800W power supply for £25 on Ebay which I guess was relatively cheap. (I don't want to think about how many Lindon Dolars or I might change my mind.)

And for anyone still having problems - hope they are fixed soon.

there is no other application that errors or crashed on my rather new machine.

anyone else tried the voice possibilities or is it another coincidence?

voice off = only the crash indicated above,
voice on = crashing out to a blue screen

I wouldn't have ever come to the JIRA with crashed as seldom as I have without voice turned on... do I need to start a new issue?

I say "if" because none of the devs are any closer to understanding what is really going on with these crashes. It's possible that Voice isn't really the problem, but that when you enable voice, it also enables some graphics widget (like the voice combo box) and something in that code freaks out the nvidia driver.

My assessment of this whole issue is that there are several problems at work, and that the best strategy is to try to separate them. Please "relate" your new issue to this one so that I'm aware of it and can watch it.

I know that a video crash being related to sound isn't very logical, but those are the symptoms that I see.

I also should mention that this is on a very new HP laptop running Vista-64 with the OEM video drivers, so I'm behind a bit on the driver until they update.

I also tend to suspect this is also related to VWR-6851 which I also suffer from, but I have no evidence to prove that.

• There are bugs in the Second Life client which pass bad data to the video driver. ATI drivers, and some nvidia drivers are able to handle the bad data gracefully, while other drivers aren't and crash.
• There are bugs in the nvidia video drivers, particularly the older OEM versions. These bugs are triggered by something new in recent SL code (the 1.20 viewer branch).
• This is a problem with Windows Vista and the way it actively (perhaps annoyingly) monitors the video driver. There's something about the way Vista interprets the nvidia driver running sl that trips some alarm that eventually crashes the system.
• These particular crashes are a symptom of underlying hardware issues. Second Life exercises graphics hardware more than most FPS games because of its extraordinary texture and mesh diversity. Thus a defective or underpowered card will be stressed with SL.

Now for the roundup of frequent posters on this JIRA:
Jeaniesing: Disabling Voice appears to stop crashes. Will start a new issue to explore any link between Voice and graphics crashes

LithiumIon: Used "FurMark" to stress test his graphics system. Found if failed just as this issue with SL. Self-diagnosed a power supply instability. Replaced power supply and crashing stopped.

Cheladie: Update to nvidia drivers 175.12 resolved the crashes

Toysoldier: Has OEM box and cannot use updated drivers. Found some relief by disabling atomopheric shaders. Suggestions: try disabling Voice as per Jeaniesing. Or try to see if it is hardware related by using FurMark to stress the graphics system.

Absolute: Update to nvidia drivers 175.12 resolved the crashes

Wolf: The reporter of this issue. Wolf – are you still having this issue? Have you tried updating your driver?

"* This is a problem with Windows Vista and the way it actively (perhaps annoyingly) monitors the video driver. There's something about the way Vista interprets the nvidia driver running sl that trips some alarm that eventually crashes the system. "

is a second life problem. Others had it and fixed their software last year as part of their Vista compatibility. The ball is in your court. I don't think Vista compatibility is optional for Second Life.

On item 2:

"* There are bugs in the nvidia video drivers, particularly the older OEM versions. These bugs are triggered by something new in recent SL code (the 1.20 viewer branch)."

Nvidia software releases are ridiculous. ATI makes a new production release monthly. Nvidia does 'beta' releases every 6-8 weeks, and a production release it seems twice a year. The result is many software defects staying for a while. However, none of those defects are material to Second Life.

What is material is the Vista incompatibility. Worse, it appears to be a poor program design issue. It needs to be fixed. If some audio drivers are causing the same failure (I am not failure with the specifics on that) it is possibly a related problem (if the audio and video server interfaces are in the same modules or otherwise linked serially)..

But, thank you for not leaving me alone to comment in this thread

I'll go looking for furmark tonight.... to see how the HP/Nvidia holds up to it

Sougent, I also have a very new HP and the 8600M video card.... I said, in a thread that preceded this one,. that the greatest source of anger for me is that I checked and rechecked SL's recommendations before buying this machine since my work in SL bought it for me, and I have barely been able to work in SL since.

SO I cannot have the last RC back... I didn't figure Just looking back at my own words from the last version"I wouldn't have ever come to the JIRA with crashed as seldom as I have without voice turned on... "

Last evening I watched a friend who has the same graphics card (albeit in a Dell rather than an HP) crash as often as I did....

I have submitted my CRASH logs almost every time but I am not sure anyone at LL is even looking at all my crash logs. I thought with all the added thread tracing that that has been added in the past 3 releases that it should provide the developers with more answers.

I know there seemed to be fingers pointing to the older or OEMed NVIDIA drivers but why only SECOND LIFE? Why only on the RC versions? Come on guys...I am sorry but I am getting real frustrated there afer months of working on this issue and tons of logs submitted to LL development and after all the diagnostic JIRA comments being fed in - that this cannot be isolated and fixed.

This week I submitted a formal problem ticket with HP asking them to update they March/08 NVIDIA driver to the more recent version released by NVIDIA. I also escalated the probelem through HP's email to CEO comments to ask why HP's OEM drivers takes so many months behind the manufacturer's release of drivers. BUT... I still am pretty convinced this is a bug with LL's code not properly written - and I agree with the predictions that the SecondLife viewers not being Vista Compatible.

I will try disabling the VOICE CHAT to see if the problem goes away. I hope you didnt mean disabling the AUDIO all together. One of the #1 reasons for me being in SL is to be involved in the club scenes (hell - I build them and have run one). I cant have an SL with no Audio stream.

Yours very frustrated...

Toy

I have already submitted to HP twice, without even a response... I also put a note into the Nvidia people telling them that HP was giving them a bad name by not updating drivers...

What were the changes in RC 11 that I have gone from crashing only out of SL (acceptable if it isn't too frequent, and it wasn't) to crashing out of Vista (unacceptable as I lose work in 3rd party programs)??

Apart from bug fixes, the diff between 10 and 11 is trivial except for one thing: the watchdog was turned back on. The watchdog was introduced a few revs back, and gave us some useful data on a variety of thread related issues. It was turned off for rc10 because we had gleaned what we could from it. Apparently was inadvertantly turned back on for rc11.

I'm currently requesting more info about this from the dev team, and also asking if there is a manual way to turn it off. I'll let you know what I find...

Toysoldier – I will try to pull up your crashes and see if there is anything I can pass on to the devs.
I hear what you're saying about the crashing and Why Only Second Life? But it's more than that. It's really Why Only Second Life + nvidia + vista? And even then why is it only some people with these configurations? That's what makes this so difficult for our devs, and so frustrating for you.

I'll let you all know what I find out with crash reports and the watchdog.

I found one crash of yours in the crash database. This means most of your crashes aren't getting through to us. The one crash i have has the log attached. I'll investigate this too...

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Issue_tracker

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Debug_Help

Towards the end of the Debug Help page is a section "Attaching the screenshot to an issue"

Please note in Vista the logs are C:\Users[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\logs You may need to Show hidden files to see them

Knowledge Base > Second Life Info > Solution Finder > Technical Issue > Where do I find my Second Life diagnostic logs? Topic #: 4051-4209
http://secondlife.com/support/?questionID=4209

also.... email notifications from the aren't working for me... I'm just a bundle of fun, eh?

1) the problem is Vista detecting a driver timeout

2) the problem doesn't affect some users

3) some users have it consistently

4) some users have it intermittently, but in clusters. For example, when I have it, I may have it EVERY 1-5 minutes after logging on (after 5 or so tries I give up and go elsewhere). Or I may have an hour or longer and never have it.

5) it doesn't occur on Linden QA cycles

First, while it is timing related it doesn't appear to be a timing issue controlled by the client PC. So watchdog on and off may be a performance issue, but shouldn't affect this.

Second, the problem IS in the client software, which not cause Vista to determine there is a driver timeout no matter what happens

Third, it is an issue with the way Nvidia did their driver, since it should have protected itself from applications. It didn't. But since they are the performance leaders, no choice here

Fourth, it may be a factor of network or server issues. If it NEVER occurs to Linden people running Vista, it may be primarily network related.

Fifth, from either code inspection or a slow or variable network simulation environment (the problem may not be speed, but a few second block in network traffic) Linden QA or development needs to recreate the problem. Both to add it to future test cases and to diagnose it.

Sixth, switching to an ATI card. 3850s are available for under $110, and 4850s under $200. The first should be more than adequate in most SL uses. The second is comparable to the better single GPU Nvidia cards (9800GTX, etc.).

This is what I have for your system:
CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2493 MHz)
Memory: 4094 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600M GS/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2

This is an HP laptop, right? What specific make, and how much RAM and video RAM? I'm going to ask our QA dept if they could buy one of these specific laptops, with an identical configuration, and see what they can discover. If you could spec your machine out for us that would be great.

That said, it's not been a case of crashing consistently each time I log in for a while, though usually at least once during a 3-4 hour session. I think I have a similar laptop as Jeaniesing, it's an HP Pavilion Entertainment PC DV9700, 4gb memory and Vista 64 (and I'd assume 64 bit Nvidia drivers too). Here's some info on the video, it it might be useful.

Also, if there are any debugging utilities I can install or options I can activate, I'd be happy to do so and run until I crash.

NVIDIA System Information report created on: 06/27/2008 11:31:00
System name: NEO

[Display]
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz (2494 MHz)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista x64 (Service Pack 1)
DirectX version: 10.0
GPU processor: GeForce 8600M GS
ForceWare version: 174.32
Total available graphics memory: 2303 MB
Dedicated video memory: 512 MB
System video memory: 0 MB
Shared system memory: 1791 MB
Video BIOS version: 60.86.4f.00.22
IRQ: 16
Bus: PCI Express x16

[Components]

nvCplUIR.dll 1.5.700.24 NVIDIA Control Panel
nvCpl.cpl 1.5.700.24 NVIDIA Control Panel Applet
nvExpBar.dll 1.5.700.24 NVIDIA Control Panel
nvCplUI.exe 1.5.700.24 NVIDIA Control Panel
nvViTvSR.dll 7.15.11.7432 NVIDIA Video and TV Server
nvViTvS.dll 7.15.11.7432 NVIDIA Video and TV Server
nvDispSR.dll 7.15.11.7432 NVIDIA Display Server
NVMCTRAY.DLL 7.15.11.7432 NVIDIA Media Center Library
nvDispS.dll 7.15.11.7432 NVIDIA Display Server
NVCPL.DLL 7.15.11.7432 NVIDIA Compatible Windows Vista Display driver, Version 174.32
nvGameSR.dll 7.15.11.7432 NVIDIA 3D Settings Server
nvGameS.dll 7.15.11.7432 NVIDIA 3D Settings Server

Watchdog is disabled and I will post results of any further crashes here

Thank you for your kind attentions....

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2094 MHz)
Memory: 3070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista (Build 6000)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600M GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.16203 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)

nVIDIA Driver Version: 7.15.11.7431 22/02/2008

and experiencing this issue without any discernable pattern.... crashes very quickly or could survive a good while. Complexity of textures may be a common factor.

Was hovering over some land for sale in Obersdorf, I believe it was, and had switched away to Firefox to check some plurks, then switched back to SL and clicked the little $ icon to bring up the sale dialog to check out the particulars of the sale, the screen immediately started flickering in waves is best I can describe it, did that for several seconds then all went blank, it recovered with the usual driver recovery message, SL crashed and started sending the info, I switched to firefox and went into gmail to click on an email containing the link to this jira entry, clicked on the link to bring up the new tab with jira in it and the cursor froze with the little Vista busy circle. Tried to get it to shut down using a press of the power button, but no joy, had to hold the sucker down until it powered off.

Will save the contents of the logs directory if you want it let me know. Not sure if anything got through during the automatic process since it froze in the middle of that.

I have tried turning off my voice and I have disabled the watchdog, and the video driver timeout crashes have not gotten any better. Since RC10, the crashes have become far worse then they were in about 7 8 9 when the crashes were actually very few. In fact they are so common now that I have relied upon version 19 most of the time now for new SL activities after I crash once on the RC each day.

A club I just built in SL 3 weeks ago seems to be a constant source of generating RC crashes. In fact I know the approxiamte spot in the club that seems to trigger me to crash within a short period of time after i stay in that area. The club is "mortuary / six feet under" and i need to stand on the or in the gave plot along the middle section of the right hand side of the grave (when entering the cemetary). The ppl I know at the club already know well enough if I disappear while there - its because of this video driver crash.

I dont know if i mentioned it but I am using and HP Pavilion DV6568SE with Vista Home Premium SP1 and all the latest drivers (including the latest March release of the OEM of the NVIDIA driver). PS... I have not heard from HP regarding when they plan to release an updated NVIDIA OEM driver.

As a builder - I am actually starting to like a couple of the new features in the new RC client so I would prefer to use the RC vs. the version 19 client. But the video driver crashes become annoying.

If there is anything else you all want me to try - just give me a shout....

Toysoldier

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t35609.html

I have a Vista 64 / 8800 GS rackmount setup that reset after 5-15 minutes in SL. I have since opened the case, and using nTune set the fan to 100% (when you got 4 other computers in the rack the sound really doesn't matter) . It's been running for over 12 hours at max res now and doesn't get past 55 C . So for me cooling seemed to be a fix. I suspect that replacing the PSU with a larger unit you are also replacing the PSU fan with a higher volume one may have something to do with it. Another person on the thread listed pointed out that the 8800 can be dumping 70-90C output air into the case as input to cool other motherboard components that may be unhappy if that is their starting point. While the card is supposed to be happy at 100+ C , is your bus controller?

Why would Vista 64 have problems? Maybe it interferes with proper fan control access.
Just guesses as to why it mysteriously went from "frustratingly unusable" to "seems solid" literally overnight .

p.s. Of course to get that 100% fan in nTune I may have turned off more than factory recommended. The next project is to turn them back on and keep the cooling, along with an aftermaket cooler...

Some observations. Seems like almost every time I'm getting this, it's when I am trying to camera around either with flycam or the regular camera movements. Occasionally, the SL viewer screen will flash and display a picture that is a scene of where I had been previously, apparently something from a buffer or from a stray portion of video memory that's getting redisplayed from the viewer. This sometimes happens without a crash and corrects itself, either that or the viewer crashes, I've had both. I've also seen it during the process of the driver crash and recovery. I'm not a C++ programmer, but this seems like you're getting into video memory areas that you shouldn't be.

I've also noticed that CPU (on both of them) spikes when the crash indicators start such as the skipping sound and video flickering. Seems like a crash is more likely for me if I've got other stuff going on in the background like Firefox with multiple tabs open, so that more memory/CPU is being used by other processes.

Noticed the following in the tail end of the log after the crash, apparently it'd been throttling back quite a bit just before the crash. FYI, my bandwidth is set to 150kbps in preferences.

2008-07-04T02:59:17Z INFO: display_stats: FPS: 10.82
2008-07-04T02:59:23Z INFO: LLViewerThrottleGroup::sendToSim: Sending throttle settings, total BW 1350
2008-07-04T02:59:23Z INFO: LLViewerThrottle::updateDynamicThrottle: Tightening network throttle to 1.3824e+006
2008-07-04T02:59:29Z INFO: LLAssetStorage::_queueDataRequest: Starting transfer for a0f34d74-59f4-51d1-1c5e-dca773c5b050
2008-07-04T02:59:29Z INFO: LLTransferManager::processTransferInfo: Receiving ac655899-1ac2-7a3e-ec14-3291839c8b4c, size 1212 bytes
2008-07-04T02:59:38Z INFO: LLViewerThrottleGroup::sendToSim: Sending throttle settings, total BW 1200
2008-07-04T02:59:38Z INFO: LLViewerThrottle::updateDynamicThrottle: Tightening network throttle to 1.2288e+006
2008-07-04T02:59:48Z INFO: LLViewerThrottleGroup::sendToSim: Sending throttle settings, total BW 1050
2008-07-04T02:59:48Z INFO: LLViewerThrottle::updateDynamicThrottle: Tightening network throttle to 1.0752e+006
2008-07-04T02:59:53Z INFO: LLViewerThrottleGroup::sendToSim: Sending throttle settings, total BW 900
2008-07-04T02:59:53Z INFO: LLViewerThrottle::updateDynamicThrottle: Tightening network throttle to 921600
2008-07-04T03:00:08Z INFO: LLViewerThrottleGroup::sendToSim: Sending throttle settings, total BW 1050
2008-07-04T03:00:08Z INFO: LLViewerThrottle::updateDynamicThrottle: Easing network throttle to 1.0752e+006

I don't know if any of this helps, wish there were a solid repro but you might try loading down your test machines a little with other stuff running then stay in-world a bit and do some camming around with parcel music going and so forth.

I haven't changed anything, haven't upgraded my drivers (I can't upgrade to newest NVIDIA drivers anyway, my computer doesn't install the latest NVIDIA drivers properly - black screen Vista issue which remains unresolved for me with the newer drivers. my NVIDIA driver is 163.75, running a 8600 GTS, on Vista 64)

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/602889/nvidia-in-financial-strife-as-it-confirms-significant-quantities-of-defective-chips.html

I mention this not in any way to exonerate the SL code, or to dismiss any of these reported problems. My purpose is to alert you in case you want to pursue anything with your OEM, especially regarding driver updates (like the one to force the fan). I imagine that some percentage of those suffering from this nvidia issue are hit by thermal/power problems (as LithiumIon, above, discovered).

I'll continue to forward any info I obtain from our QA and developers.

Although I agree that for some individuals, this recent NVIDIA thermal problem could be the source of the problem - specially since running the SL viewer puts huge heat generating stresses on the GPU (I can clearly notice it on my HP DV6568SE laptop whereby the system fan turns on immediately when SL starts and the underbelly and case get pretty damn hot), this HW problem you point out doesnt make complete sense since previous non-RC code also stresses out the GPU and I dont get these Video Driver application crashes... it only happens on the RC code. That still seems to point the source of the root problem toward app code and maybe an outdated driver prob combo.

PS... my system does not crash - just the SL application. I can simply double click the SL app and I am back in.

and so we wait.

Toy

HP says, "Jeanie, I would like to inform you that currently the NVIDIA graphics cards which are shipped with the HP notebooks have no issues. The BSOD error occur when there is corrupt software programs or due to incompatibility of the game."

System:
HP Pavilion dv9843cl
2.10GHz Intel Centrino 2 Core Duo Processor T8100
NVIDIA 8600M GS
Video Memory: up to 2303 MB (512 dedicated)
Memory: 4GB
OS: Vista Home Premium 64 bit with SP1

Second Life 1.19.1 (4)

I have tried installing several of the drivers mentioned by people having this problem, but still no luck. I've tried drivers 174.93, 177.66, and 7.15.11.7432 A.

I have sent an e-mail off to HP with a link to this blog and a link to the article about NVIDIA financial hit due to their faulty graphic cards.

This is rather embarrassing because I'm trying to convince an academic library consortium to use Second Life for meetings, and I can't even log on!

Currently random crashes, often it was a particular place that triggered it, like Eshis Flower Tower at Desperado:

Screen turns black
After vision is restored, Second Life Window is black
Warning pop up on the lower right hand corner of the primary monitor stating my display drivers stopped responding and have been recovered successfully
Second Life attempts to restore graphics
Second Life fails with a Run Time error, and window locks on the screen, with some of my desktop icons showing through the black window.
I have to force the exe to quit

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz)
Memory: 3326 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista (Build 6000)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8800 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2

I tryed out all sorts of settings, I crashed even at all settings minimized, antialiasing disabled etc.

But, then I turned of 'Enable Open Vertex Buffer Objects' and I havent crashed since. I have everyting maxed out, and went to Eshis Flower with 55 people on the sim, and all went perfect.

heat is not the problem, I turned on my machine after being away a week, sitting nearly in front of an AC vent, SL was on for 3 minutes and kaboom....

Asus G1Sn
Nvidia GeForce 9500M GS
Core2 Intel T9300/2.5GHz
4MB Ram 64bit Vista Home Premium

Sad day

SL viewer crashed and started the crash reporter, but the whole computer froze up and I had to CTR-ALT-DEL out of theSL viewer

Later Edit :.....
After reading Sougent's comments about sound involved, I realized that my crash occurred while Iwas changing stations on my radio.
Yak

Second Life 1.20.15 (92456) Jul 18 2008 10:58:42 (Second Life Release)

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz)
Memory: 3326 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista (Build 6000)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8800 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.16935 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)

The latest release has done nothing to fix the problem. It still video driver crashes about 2 or 3 times a night for inexplicable reasons as well as has many times where the screen freezes for 1 to 5 seconds but thankfully just recovers without crashing.

I have tried all the different scenarios and nothing seems to make it better or worse. As such I have put all my shading back on so that I can at least enjoy the view of SL while I have not crashed.

As I reported last month - I did open a ticket with HP reporting that their NVIDIA driver they currently have released is outdated and needs to be upgraded to possibly correct my SL problem... I am very confident that my time and effort to report this problem to HP was about 1/2 of my life that I wont ever get back. They simply dont care.

But... I still hold out that since the crashes dont happen in version 19 and they do in all the RC 20 releases... this is still a problem that LL developed triggered and should have a way to back out until the NVIDIA drivers are properly updated by all the slowwwww moving laptop OEMs!

I havent heard from Periapse or anyone else from LL lately regarding this problem. Have they come to the conclusion that the problem is an NVIDIA OEM driver problem and not LL's anymore? Has it been 100% confirmed that the latest generic release of the NVIDIA driver (which obviously the owners of laptops cannot use) has corrected the problem?

Toysoldier Thor

00trader00, and others still stuck with this issue: 1.20 is not a mandatory update. Please continue to use 1.19.4. If you have already dowloaded 1.20, you can re-download 1.19.4 from here:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/10_Things_You_Want_to_Know_in_Your_new_1.20_Viewer#Where_can_I_get_the_previous_viewer_1.19.1.3F

Lately, I've been seeing a variation that I never used to see. I get screen flickering/stuttering along with sound stuttering, both CPU's are maxed, but the driver doesn't crash and though the computer is effectively locked up, the sound stuttering remains (even though I tend to lose the screen eventually) and in the case of the streaming music, it appears to continue to stream though I'm not sure because I don't let this go on for long for fear of damaging my speakers. I have attempted to get it to log off by pressing the power button to trigger a shutdown but that doesn't work so it's essentially locked up.

SL crashes within 5 minutes usually with Page Fault Blue screen, sometimes just dumps me back to vista, sometimes reboots the computer, sometimes freezes. Ive tried installing lots of Nvidia drivers even up to the 177.xx ones on Guru3D.
I was able to stop the flashing by disabling Aero. I try running in XP Compatibility mode. Ive turned off avatar imposters and all the shading etc. and still crashes within 5 minutes. It happens in 1.19.1.4 or in 1.20.xx.
I have noticed the CPU is at 100% when the crashes occur and it may be related to temp but i have fans on everything and the case top off as well. XP seems to be stable with my Nvidia 5700 card but when I try to use XP to troubleshoot by putting that drive in my new souped up case, it wants me to re activate (grrrrrrr MS) and Im afraid that will kill my "working" SL computer, which I need to do music shows and machinima untill I can get this bug resolved with my better rig.

I commend Periapse on all the work that has been done on this. I think that maybe a summit with Linden Labs, Nvidia people and MS Vista people is needed to track this one down. Get them all talking so effective drivers can be written...or a solution found.

how about this???...a meeting in SL with LL(Periapse and techbuds), Nvidia and MS people in a room with all the ppl who wish to come who are experiencing this problem. Then when we crash and log back in we can discuss what happened and share error msgs and crash logs etc. It might be entertaining to see avies popping on and off and back on again like popcorn and give these engineers some grist for their mills. LOL

Stats: Gateway FX4710
Windows Vista 64-bit sp1
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Quad Core 2.5 GHz each core
6 GB of Ram
Nvidia 9800GT 512MB

I did have OEM drivers and some have suggested that if you have a mean laptop maker like Dell (like I do), they won't let you upgrade to Nvidia's latest drivers... true, but not unfixable. I downloaded my 175.16 driver from laptopvideo2go.com, and installed it with their modded INF file there and it seems to work fine. For that release see:

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?s=a4fee73e3a631c0069982fd620d44ed7&showtopic=18548

As those drivers are unsupported, please note I'm not saying they won't eat your laptop - risk is yours - but it didn't eat mine.

Hope this helps someone!
Honey

I have been following this thread, because I get a similar crash resulting in a C++ Runtime Error (VWR-2095) and then a black login screen (VWR-2610) unless I restart my whole system. Since Monday, I have been unable to run SL for more than about a minute before it crashes. My system isn't as meaty as some described here, but I have tried pretty much everything to fix this as I've been having the problem since last year (i.e. 1.18 or so) and it's incredibly frustrating.

The comments about the CPU 100% and also someone's comment on the 1.20 release Blog (LL official blog) about high RAM usage (also see VWR-6965) have caused me to try running Task Manager whilst SL is on. Here's what I've found:

• if SL gets to 100% RAM (or very close) and stays there for more than a few seconds, it crashes with the C++ Runtime Error
• SL starts with low RAM (about 40MB) and ramps up once textures start loading, to about 100-120MB. If the RAM use further rises to about 140MB, SL crashes (with the C++ Runtime Error)
• If I change focus to the Task Manager window at any time when SL is running - in particular when the CPU use has gone to 97%plus - the CPU usage drops and it seems to avert a crash
• If I minimise SL window shortly after it loads, RAM use will drop from around 100MB to about 30Mb.
• If at any time I notice the RAM use ramping up, and minimise SL window, the RAM drops and it seems to avert a crash

I managed to run for about an hour last night (stopped cos it was bed time!) without crashing by doing the workarounds mentioned above - minimising SL window if RAM use went high; changing focus to Task Manager if CPU usage went high.

Obviously this is not a good solution - having the Task Manager open covers up a good chunk of my SL window - but at least it helped me to get some building done.

I offer it as a possible help for some of the people who are still bothered by this issue, and as a potential pointer for LL Developers in case the memory issues are related to the Nvidia crash.

System specs:
CPU: AMD K7 XP, MMX (1143 MHz)
Memory: 2560 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 6600 LE
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
DirectX ver 10
.NET framework ver 3.5

2nd Life Version: 1.20 (RC all versions and main viewer) - Nicholaz (all editions) - 1.19 - right back to 1.18.3.5
Nvidia graphics drivers version: have tried loads, currently 175.19

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showforum=94

I have a Asus G1 laptop with NVidia 9500M GS graphphics and Vista 64 Bit so got the 177.79 version of that, subbed in the modded INF file, uninstalled whatever nvidia stuff i had already using add/remove programs and then installed this.

Basically seems to be working, i'm using the RC software now and most all is good. Only weired think is that some times logging in I'm getting 5 fps but most others around 25fps. I think the 5fps lag tho is some normal crap issues with SL as my friends are also complaining about that at times today.

Very happy to have this reasonably work'ed around...if ur a woman Honey look me up maybe hook up for a thankyou yiff

After 5 minutes the cursor becomes corrupt and within 30 sec black screen. Reset required.
Got an RMA for the card for another 8800GS from EVGA. Installed , same behavior.
Underclocking on both card seems to last longer but same eventual results.
Used RealXtend 0.3 viewer. Same behavior, same results. (Seems whatever is the problem may be shared with RealXtend which has an SL viewer codebase...)
Got 177.79 drivers. Same behavior, same results.
Switched to 1.19.1.4. Same behavior, same results.

Summary: using any combination of all the avaiable viewer/driver combinations, after 5-10 minutes I can't see a thing.

Is this problem across all nVidia card drivers? I would like to use some version to do CUDA developement, and it would be nice to see inside SL, and do so on the same machine.

I cranked up all graphics to ultra, max custom everything on and was getting 25fps, turned on anisotropic also and then crashed at store http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cristat/38/233/35

Vista Home Premium SP1 w/ all recommended updates
NVidia GeForce 8600 GT 7.15.11.6960 which is current

I have been using 1.20 for a long time now starting with the first RC version... I have never had a problem with my Nvidia 7800GT with the NGO drivers.

http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=nvidia XP

http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=nvidia2 VISTA

For me the NGO Optimized drivers have always worked better in SL than the official versions.

Keeping Anisotropic filtering off went hours w/o any crash or lag. Hasn't been that good ever i would say.

So looks like desktop people need latest at:
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Files&go=cat&dwn_cat_id=15

And laptop people:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showforum=94

Might be good idea to render links to this page on prims at our places in SL with soo many people telling me they are crashing all the time due to driver issues.

Ticket closed for me.

Configuration:
ASUS M51Sn laptop
NVidia 9500M GS
Kubuntu Linux (Hardy) running Linux 2.6.24-19 kernel
1.20.15_92456 release client

Anyone had any success in resolving this under Linux?

Second Life 1.20.15 (92456) Jul 18 2008 10:58:42 (Second Life Release)
Second Life Server 1.23.4.93100
CPU: AMD 4000+ (2109 MHz)
Memory: 2046 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista (Build 6000)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8500 GT/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.17250 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)

I haven't gotten the same kind of crash as before (with the caveat that I've not been in SL a lot lately) but I'm still crashing. Haven't had the entire laptop lock up and the driver crash and recover, but I have several times had the SL viewer go black (and white for that matter) and the viewer freeze and crash with the same symptoms as before for that aspect of this crash.

So far I'd have to say the updated drivers may be helping to prevent the entire system from freezing requiring a power off and the issue with the driver crashing and recovering, but they don't appear to fully prevent the issue.

Updated drivers aren't the fix for this issue.

I loaded whql drivers 175.19 for the Nvidia
and now (knock on wood) vista and SL are working together. Oh I am running the latest release CANDIDATE.
I have been on as long as 4 hours at a stretch without crashing now...and the power of my new system is evident as lag has been minimal and the game play pretty quick. I suspect it was a bad video card memory or either the system was overheating but dont know for sure since I replaced everything. One things for sure...a component was failing. Hope this helps!!!

>>I haven't gotten the same kind of crash as before (with the caveat that I've not been in SL a lot lately) but I'm still crashing. Haven't had the entire laptop lock up and the driver crash and recover, but I have several times had the SL viewer go black (and white for that matter) and the viewer freeze and crash with the same symptoms as before for that aspect of this crash.

Sougent....i've been stable for quite some time now on 177.79 on my 9500M GS laptop....for me it was really critical to completly rid the system of all NVidia drivers completely first. If you can go back and use the uninstallers to strip off what you can then reboot. Then use DriveSweeper to rid urself of all software Nvidia http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

At that point I ran the 177.79 installer..(make sure you have the properly modded INF)....also I further modded the INF so that the stupid card doesn't go into slowdown mode when on batteries. Apparently these NVidia cards have 3 power modes ...get the wrong mode and ur at 5fps or less.... change Powermizer settings in INF to:

;Powermizer settings
HKR,, PowerMizerDefault, %REG_DWORD%, 1 ;was 3
HKR,, PowerMizerEnable, %REG_DWORD%, 1
HKR,, PowerMizerLevel, %REG_DWORD%, 1 ;was 3
HKR,, PowerMizerLevelAC, %REG_DWORD%, 1
HKR,, PowerSaverHsyncOn, %REG_DWORD%, 1
HKR,, EnableCoreSlowdown, %REG_DWORD%, 1
HKR,, EnableMClkSlowdown, %REG_DWORD%, 1
HKR,, EnableNVClkSlowdown, %REG_DWORD%, 1

this way you get full speed all the time but power savings can still turn the card down...remember to run in maximum performance mode with your power settings

I'd be very curious to learn if this works for you and if I am just lucky or this new driver really solves the issue... BTW I see Nvidia upto 177.83 but i'm not changing till the Lindens mess it all up again.

You are at 192317.7, 231455.5, 401.4 in Pacific Vineyards located at sim2804.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.19.47:12035)
Second Life Server 1.23.4.93100

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2194 MHz)
Memory: 2046 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.17498 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 0/809 (0.0%)

Within 30 minutes of the 1.20 upgrade I started crashing... same symptoms as described in the root case. Any time I logged back in, and was in the presence of another avatar, I'd crash withing 30 seconds to a minute. When logged in alone, not in proximity to other av's, I was seemingly stable, tho the "near other av's matter may be coincidence".

I've since updated my driver to the NGO nVidia ForceWare 177.83 driver for Windows Vista 32.

Though my crash rate is not as sever as preciously noted (i.e. I've been up for as long as 30 minutes w/o crash), the problem persists with the same symptoms.

Anxious for a true solution as my 3DConnexion Space Navigator Controller is a rather expensive paperweight atm.

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=31913

I'd followed the advice given and uninstalled my existing drivers and installed the most current drivers from laptop2go which minimized my issues, possibly resolved them as I hadn't crashed for a while, however I ran into an issue which has caused me to back out the drivers to the current OEM drivers. With the newer drivers, I couldn't play blueray disks in my quite pricey blueray disk drive in my laptop, got an error and so far haven't found a resolution for that. Upon going back the older drivers, the symptoms reoccur, so I can vouch for the fact that the newer drivers do help.

However, to expect any but the bravest and most tech savvy individuals to do this would seem to me to be unreasonable. There ought to be something that can be done on the viewer side to mitigate this issue.

Brand Galindo - 07/Sep/08 07:42 AM
Both of the links in the Description lead to error pages (pages not found).

I have been to countless other forums, discussions, press releases, etc. that are dedicated to this exact problem. I have spent hours upon hours reading through volumes of reports that have been issued to describe the problem, some that claim to partially alleviate the symptoms and others that supposedly point to more help on the topic. I have had absolutely NO results from any of the suggested actions to do so much as even reduce the frequency of the issue by a tiny fraction. Here is what I have done so far that has been suggested elsewhere:

1. Turn off atmospheric shaders in the graphics preferences.

2. Deactivate the voice chat feature completely.

3. Set the Watchdog feature in the debug console to False.

4. Provide extra cooling (without overclocking) to the video card.

5. Update the video drivers to the latest OPEN GL drivers (which are newer than the latest OEM drivers).

6. Update to the latest SL viewer (I have tried, both, the latest release viewer and the latest RC viewer).

**None of these have worked for me in the slightest!!!!**

I am not here to rant, though. I can't expect to have full support - after all, I am running Vista 64 and my video card is an nVIDIA 8500 GTX - both of which are not on the "approved" list from Linden Labs. If I find a resolution for this problem it will likely be incidental to someone else's that falls within the range of support.

My question to (hopefully) further this along is...

Since the timeout is happening on the video driver end of the chain, is there no way to possibly configure something in the video card's feature set to avoid this issue? Since I have been trying to avoid it from the SL client - to no avail - even by putting all of the settings at their minimum (how awful SL looks when that is done!) I would think that maybe there is some setting I could try to disable in my video card's performance menu to avoid this issue.

I would relay all of my specs like I have seen others do - but I don't know how to do that yet - I am new to JIRA.

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=65161

NVIDIA Statement on TDR Errors, Display driver nvlddmkm stopped...

What is TDR? Windows Vista has a new feature called Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR). TDR attempts to detect problematic situations and recover to a functional desktop dynamically. In prior operating systems these situations would have resulted in a system freeze and forced customers to reboot their PC. More information about this Vista feature can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/displ...dm_timeout.mspx. Therefore, when you see the TDR error message "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered", you know that the display driver is being reset without requiring a reboot.

Why does it happen? TDRs can occur for a variety of reasons, many of which are unrelated to the graphics card or graphics driver. Since Vista launched, NVIDIA has been working hard to address TDRs issues that are specific to the graphics driver. Last year, we set up the NVIDIA Vista Quality Assurance Site to record and address user issues: http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance.html. Since that time, we have resolved a majority of the issues specific to the graphics driver and have also worked directly with Microsoft to release five Vista hotfixes, all of which are now part of Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). If customers are still experiencing issues, we recommend that they continue to file issues at the quality assurance site. We also recommend that customers look carefully into the wide range of other causes of TDR issues such as overclocked components, incorrect component compatibility and settings (especially memory configuration and timings), defective parts (memory modules, motherboards, etc.), insufficient system cooling, and insufficient system power. Throughout the forums, there are numerous reports of hardware solutions to TDRs.

Here is the report from DirectX (edited for applicability):

Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6001) Service Pack 1 (6001.vistasp1_gdr.080425-1930)
System Manufacturer: Gateway
System Model: DX4710-UB301A
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6700 @ 2.66GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory: 6142MB RAM
Page File: 1226MB used, 11166MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 10
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 6.00.6001.18000 32bit Unicode

Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: GeForce 8500 GT
DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0421&SUBSYS_0480196E&REV_A1
Display Memory: 2539 MB
Dedicated Memory: 493 MB
Shared Memory: 2046 MB
Current Mode: 1920 x 1200 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor: HP w2408 Wide LCD Monitor
Driver Name: nvd3dum,nvd3dumx.dll,nvwgf2um,nvwgf2umx.dll
Driver Version: 7.15.0011.6925 (English)
DDI Version: 10
Driver Attributes: Final Retail
Driver Date/Size: 12/11/2007 18:06:00, 5263360 bytes
WHQL Logo'd: Yes
WHQL Date Stamp:
Device Identifier: {D7B71E3E-4761-11CF-D361-8B2401C2CA35}
Vendor ID: 0x10DE
Device ID: 0x0421
SubSys ID: 0x0480196E
Revision ID: 0x00A1
Video Accel: ModeMPEG2_A ModeMPEG2_C ModeVC1_C ModeWMV9_C ModeVC1_B ModeWMV9_B ModeVC1_A ModeWMV9_A
Deinterlace (Info omitted for brevity)
DDraw Status: Enabled
D3D Status: Enabled
AGP Status: Enabled

I can supply information from the Second Life logs - but I'm not sure what would be helpful here.

An update to my previous comments - I do see that now my graphics card AND OS is listed on the Second Life Minimum Requirements page - so I assume that Linden Labs IS supporting my configuration.

**UPDATE** - 9/11/08 -
I have downloaded the latest SL RC viewer (the one that was posed as mandatory for me today) and completely uninstalled the nVidia drivers, allowed Vista to insert the default drivers then installed the latest nVidia beta driver (released 8/26/08).

These procedures did not help me at all.

Also, out of curiosity, I put my SL graphics preferences at their absolute minimum - including the lowest draw distance, all whistles and bells off, etc. - and I crashed just like I would have if the graphics were on their highest settings with every whistle and bell turned on.

After heavily researching this in the nVidia forums and many Microsoft support sites, it seems that everyone has an opinion, a few people have some random luck with a few home-brewed remedies of their own but there is no recognition of the source of the problem yet - and this has been going on for long over a year now!

I have not tried to edit my registry to increase the TDR timeout delay. I really REALLY want to stay out of my registry - even if it is likely to alleviate the frequency of the crashes.

One thing I noted that a few of the posts made mention of was that this was not an issue until immediately after a particular Windows Security Update. Which one? I sure wish I had kept track!!!! This is what happened to me. Previous to the update there were no issues. After that it was too late. I didn't work on this issue until too many mysterious updates followed so I couldn't roll back to find the working configuration. It has been suggested that this same phenomenon happened following a driver update or a SL client update.

I suppose the point is that nobody is any closer to having a clue. I wish I could push push push Linden Labs to "do something about this" but it is probably not in their hands. My vote is still strongly posted on this thread, but it's really not looking good.

I'm heartbroken that I have spent what I did on my (otherwise amazing) video card and am unable to return it to try something else. I can't afford to spring for a new one - or upgrade any components in the hopes that they MIGHT clear up the problem.

I am just pleading for anyone else who MIGHT have an issue that COULD be at all related to this issue to PLEASE vote for this thread so that more hats in the ring may get (faster?) results - or maybe SOME official word from those who are most likely to have a clue. Also, please exert a similar effort on the nVidia site because it seems the problem is hinting in that direction. Of course, nVidia is extremely silent about it, but, again, more voices may get more attention.

Working environment under Linux:
Second Life 1.20.15 (92456) Jul 18 2008 10:37:50 (Second Life Release)

You are at 259538.7, 261258.1, 3999.7 in Lutra located at sim3995.agni.lindenlab.com (63.210.156.153:13001)
Second Life Server 1.24.5.96115

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9500 @ 2.60GHz
Memory: 3042 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 22:56:21 UTC 2008 i686
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 9500M GS/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 173.14.12
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.18030 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 1/794 (0.1%)

ii nvidia-glx-new-dev-envy 173.14.12+2.6.24.503-503.30 NVIDIA binary XFree86 4.x/X.Org 'new' driver
ii nvidia-glx-new-envy 173.14.12+2.6.24.503-503.30 NVIDIA binary XFree86 4.x/X.Org 'new' driver
ii nvidia-kernel-common 20051028+1ubuntu8 NVIDIA binary kernel module common files
ii nvidia-new-kernel-source-envy 173.14.12+2.6.24.503-503.30 NVIDIA binary 'new' kernel module source
ii nvidia-settings 1.0+20080304-0ubuntu1.1 Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driv

Linux kubuntu Hardy 2.6.24.19-generic kernel

The reading I have done seems to have turned up the same issue with ATI cards - but I don't typically see the ongoing posts that the proposed solution "didn't work" - typically after a driver release for the card. The nVidia customers do not seem to be benefitting from such luck with the driver releases nVidia has offered (very sparingly at that).

Tonight I am going to plug my monitor into my integrated MB output to see if the problem still happens with the Intel circuitry.

I didn't use the computer with the integrated graphics output because when I switched the video cable to it it had been disabled - and I did not want to go back and reconfigure to use it just yet. I put the video cable back into the nVidia card output and went for another round of software fixes.

I uninstalled the nVidia drivers and tried to delete the remaining files, but even with the cleanup utility I got, there were seven that wouldn't go away. None of them were the nvlddmkm file, so I left them alone. The default drivers loaded themselves (Standard VGA drivers) and I then reinstalled the nVidia 1.77.92 beta drivers (just as I had before). After the restart, I went into the WIndows preferences and disabled the UAC (User Account Control) for Vista.

I then proceeded to play Second Life (using the 1.20.15 viewer) for about 5 hours straight without a crash - and when it did finally crash, it was NOT a TDR error, but an "Out of Memory - Please free up some memory... etc." error and I had to abort and restart SL to recover from it. Yes, it was an error and yes, it did crash SL, but it wasn't the TDR error and that's a good thing. I don't think I'm out of the woods yet - it seems that on all of the forums I have seen people happily reporting their fixes for the TDR issues they sneak back in after a day or two and continue to do their damage. If mine comes back, I will certainly be right back here to update this thread!

I Have NEVER experienced this crash – Maybe it's my driver – dunno.

Nvidia 9800GT – Nvidia Driver: 7.15.11.7516 (dated 5/2/08)

Windows XP Home Premium 64-bit
Quad Core Q9300
6 gigs RAM

Occaisionally I get the "Out of Memory Error " requiring a re-log - but this only happens if I have been online for mor than 4-5 hours.

.

.

An update on my stability:

Since my last post I have not had a single TDR crash AT ALL! I had one out of memory error on the first day and none since then - although I would expect those once in a while. Still...

NO TDR YET!

Tickmark "Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects",
under Preferences --> Graphics --> Hardware Options.

Second Life 1.21.4 (98167) Sep 30 2008 15:28:25 (Second Life Release Candidate)
Release Notes

You are at 239173.1, 257726.5, 415.2 in Amber located at sim5251.agni.lindenlab.com (8.2.32.252:13000)
Second Life Server 1.24.9.98659
Release Notes

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2999 MHz)
Memory: 3070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
Video Driver: 32bit 178.13

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.18609 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 343/83474 (0.4%)

Second Life 1.21.5 (98701) Oct 6 2008 10:27:21 (Second Life Release Candidate)
Release Notes

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2997 MHz)
Memory: 3070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+/PCI/SSE2
Video Driver Version: 178.13
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.18644 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)

Within a couple minutes of enabling this BASIC SHADER function, my SL application froze, screen flikkered, and crashed with the dreaded video driver no responding error. I re-logged two more times and disabled other shading features available when BASIC SHADING is enabled, but I still crashed. I returned the 3rd time and disabled the BASIC SHADER. The crashing stopped.

OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8400M

Its on my HP Pavilion laptop with the OEMed graphics driver that HP still has not updated since March of 2008.

Seems this bug will never be removed from the RC of the SL viewer.

Just wanted the SL Developers to know that I am still having this problem since I first reported this back in April. I dont think there is much value in submitting the crash reports to LL as I have for so long but it doesnt seem to be helping idetnify the root cause of the problem. IFLL developers want me to simulate the crash again and send the crash report... just tell me and I will generate the crash and send it.

Toysoldier Thor

I am running a single Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX, driver date is May 2008 (later versions cause the black alpha issue AND the crashing), with Windows XP SP3.

I have been told by a LL tech support person that the 9800GTX is unsupported by SecondLife, so would like to know when it's going to BE supported please. This is a very popular graphics card and has been around for a while now, plus there have been several RC and standard viewer updates since then, so please, can we have some stability for 9800GTX users?

heres the supportlist:
[DEV_0098&SUBSYS_203D161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800[DEV_0098&SUBSYS_2052161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800[DEV_0098&SUBSYS_2054161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800[DEV_0099&SUBSYS_05901558] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX[DEV_00C8&SUBSYS_203D161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800[DEV_0148&SUBSYS_203D161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600[DEV_0148] NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600[DEV_0167&SUBSYS_203D161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200[DEV_0167&SUBSYS_2047161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200[DEV_0168&SUBSYS_203D161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400[DEV_0168&SUBSYS_2047161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400[DEV_0168] NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400[DEV_01D7&SUBSYS_203D161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300[DEV_01D7&SUBSYS_2054161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300[DEV_01D8&SUBSYS_203D161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400[DEV_01D8&SUBSYS_2052161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400[DEV_01D8&SUBSYS_2054161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400[DEV_0297&SUBSYS_2052161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX[DEV_0298&SUBSYS_05911558] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS[DEV_0298&SUBSYS_2052161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS[DEV_0298&SUBSYS_2054161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS[DEV_0299&SUBSYS_05901558] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX[DEV_0299&SUBSYS_05911558] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX[DEV_0299&SUBSYS_2052161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX[DEV_0398&SUBSYS_2054161F] NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600[DEV_0409&SUBSYS_2052161F] NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT[DEV_040D&SUBSYS_2052161F] NVIDIA Quadro FX 1600M[DEV_0608&SUBSYS_207A161F] NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX[DEV_060B&SUBSYS_207A161F] NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GT[DEV_0617&SUBSYS_207A161F] NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX[DEV_06E9&SUBSYS_00011895] NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS

the downloads:
XP 32bit: http://laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=20809
xp 64bit : http://laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=21224

vista 32bit: http://laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=20810
vista 64bit: http://laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=21230

i'l hope it wil do you as much a pleasure as it did me yesterday

runnin releasecandidate smoooooth in ultraaaaaa!!!!!

found this for you from the same alienware.

ForceWare 174.74 XP Drivers

For Models: GeForce 9800 GTX

XP SLI driver for the GeForce 9800 GTX video card.

File Size: 39 MB
File Date: 3/24/2008
Platform(s): Windows XP, Windows XP Media Center

http://support.alienware.com/Support_Pages/Restricted_Pages/driver_downloads.aspx

i did found also a release of a version 178.24 wich is downloadable from the nvidia website http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_178.24_whql.html

im NOT promising ya anything ,but i hope your sl adventure will be as smooth as mine now..had yesterday a 13 hour online experience and i worked out pretty good until the last hour cause of high temperatures of the card wich result in some hick ups but no crashes.

Greetzzz Vril tone

Can someone please fix this!!!

Here's where I found the "solution"
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=25381

and here's instructions on how to do it:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-aero-on-windows-vista/

My main point - since my fix I have still had no issues conserning this. I have blocked nVidia auto-updates to keep that company from slipping in a damaged driver without my knowledge.

Hang in there, folks - I am still monitoring this issue because I am interested in following nVidia's poor response to this issue.

And yea, turn off Aero, whatever you do. I run mine on Vista Basic and I don't get the crashes.

Nvidia says "When an NVIDIA display driver update is performed, the new driver will remove the previous drivers during the installation processor. Sometimes it is not successful in removing the older display drivers which can lead to display issues later on as a result of conflicting drivers. As a basic practice, it is recommended that you first uninstall the older display drivers before updating to a newer version."
http://nvidia.custhelp.com How do I uninstall my NVIDIA Forceware display drivers? Answer ID 10

Driver Installation Hints

• "Download Accelerator" utilities should be disabled when downloading any drivers.
• Do not run virus protection software in the background while installing the drivers. This prevents the driver from configuring itself properly.
  http://www.nvidia.com/object/driver_installation_hints.html

Please run DxDiag on your Vista SP1 OS. Does it report any issues? Which graphics driver version does it detect?

Vista: Click Start > (in start search) Type dxdiag > Click on the programme > Save All Information. Please attach the text file to this issue.

Knowledge Base > Second Life Info > Solution Finder > Technical Issue > What is a graphics card? Will mine work with Second Life? How do I tell which one I have? Topic #: 4051-3886
http://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=3886

For account-specific help please post a Ticket with Support http://secondlife.com/support/

Thank you : )

Intel core 2 series processor (2399MHz) Q6600
Memory: 4095 MB
Microsoft Windows Vista service pack 1, 64-bit edition
Graphics Card Nvidia GeForce 8500GT/PCI/SSE2
HP Pavilion Media Center M8430f
7500GB hard drive

assuming you are the administrator:

Start menu > Control panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Continue > Startup and Recovery > Settings and deselect "Automatically Restart"

or Visit the below URL for the steps:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&cc=us&docname=c00815926&dlc=en

Display driver stops working momentarily as a result of which RC 1.22 crashes. I did not have this problem with normal viewer (nor with RC 1.21).

CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2399 MHz)
Memory: 3071 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8400 GS/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2

Nvidia Driver 178.24

Have attached my secondlife log – i don't crash, SL just hangs so I have no crash report,

My graphics card is a 256 Mb ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650. I have done a clean install of latest drivers from laptop manufacturer dated December 16, after first uninstalling all ATI software including the control center. Driver release now reports as ATI 8.52 4.5-081002a-070479C-Lenovo.

Tried increasing the Vista timeout delay for the GPU from default 2 seconds to 5 seconds by adding the TrdDelay key to the registry but only effect was increasing the number of seconds after logon to SL before failure correspondingly.

Have verified that all memory is ok and that Vista is correctly reporting it as 4.00Gb.

Knowledge Base > Second Life Info > Solution Finder > Technical Issue > How do I get the latest drivers for my graphics card? Topic #: 4051-3884

I believe you are using the ATI Catalyst 8.8. There were issues with Second Life and these Graphics Card drivers, which were fixed with the release of Catalyst 8.9; please see VWR-8717.

If you still have an issue, please reopen VWR-5559 and comment on your full computer environment, Help > About Second Life, including the Viewer you are using.

Thank you : )

For account-specific help please post a Ticket with Support

So I downloaded the Catalyst 8.12 driver for the desktop version of HD3650 and modified it with the Mobility modder to force it to install on my laptop, see http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php. Second Life now works without any problems

Pretty irritating to say the least that Lenovo in December ships a new display driver based on a four releases backdated version of the ATI driver.

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (3333 MHz)
Memory: 3328 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+/PCI/SSE2 Display Driver 181.22
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2

After running mov or MP4 videos on my parcels, the client viewer screen would turn pink and heavily pixelated but I could still move the mouse pointer for a few seconds. Then the whole viewer was frozen and about 5 minutes later I got a Windows error message saying "STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER". Windows had to be shut down and reboot as a result. I could successfully reproduce this 3 times in a role last week. I am afraid to run any QT in SL for now.

Second Life 1.21.6 (99587) Oct 14 2008 17:42:25 (Second Life Release)

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9450 @ 2.66GHz (4 CPUs).
Memory: 2047 MB.
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.8494 Release
Catalyst Version: 9.2

This problem has been persistent since catalyst drivers 8.6 for me.

Or have a look at: http://www.repairyourpcnow.com/resources/atikmdag-has-stopped-responding.php?comm_page=2

Windows Vista Ultimate sp1 all updates installed (05/26/09)
Amd Athlon 64 X2 6000+
4 gig dual chan ram
Nvidia 8800 GTS (driver 185.85)

I am having the same symptoms only i'm using XP as someone else above mentioned... I've updated the latest drivers from nvidia, and the latest client.. sometimes i last for a few hours, other times only minutes. And it hangs up and eventually crashes pc. Only occurs in SL environment.

Windows XP - Media Edition sp3 (all updates installed on 6/3/09)
NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT, 1gb, (drivers: 6.14.11.8585)

Second Life 1.22.11 (113941) Mar 6 2009 12:50:02 (Second Life Release)

CPU: AMD (Athlon 64 Processor 3000+) (1790 MHz)
Memory: 2047 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 9400 GT/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 3.0.0

I have the Atmospheric Shaders off, and graphics settings on low (non-custom) and it still happens.

To make this easier, we've added graphics driver info to the Help/About Second Life menu. This info will be available in the upcoming 1.23 viewer release.

Thanks for all the help and patience on this.

In my case, I have an Alienware Laptop with "NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 (Microsoft Corporation - WDDM)" drivers installed. Vista 32. Latest SL RC and non-RC.

These MS drivers are stable but SL won't run (see below for error message).

If I shoehorn the latest Nvidia drivers in by tweaking the inf file it regularly crashes the graphics card.

Alienware say they don't support the 6800 anymore so they're not helping.

Nvidia won't install updated drivers because they say that the manufacturer (Alienware) wants users to get their drivers direct from Alienware. So Nvidia aren't helping either.

Second Life won't even run and gives the error message: "Second Life is unable to run because your video card drivers did not install properly, are out of date, or are for unsupported hardware. Please make sure you have the latest video card drivers and even if you do have the latest, try reinstalling them. If you continue to receive this message, contact customer service."

And so here we are. I really would like to be able to log in to Second Life again.

Thanks.

Second Life Server 1.26.4.120562
Release Notes

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2494 MHz)
Memory: 4094 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8600M GS/PCI/SSE2
Windows Graphics Driver Version: 7.15.0011.7432
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.18.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8j zlib/1.2.3
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.740000
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.24544 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.21_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 33/176843 (0.0%)

At this point Zen Linden is going to be reaching out to specific OEM makers (Alienware, or HP for example) as well as the video card companies themselves. Keeping track of these is a challenge unless he has a separate JIRA for each.

The new graphics driver info in 1.23 is useful, so please use 1.23 or later (1.23 rc3 is available now) and copy the Help/About Second Life contents into the issue (see Jeaniesing's comment above for example).

Thanks,
--Periapse

The issue is that problems like these are being resolved by newer releases of the Graphics drivers from companies like NVIDIA, but the OEMs like HP are simply not keeping up with these graphic driver updates.

Example, for my HP Pavillion DV6568SE Laptop. The latest driver release from HP for this NVIDIA card is:

NVIDIA GeForce Series Video Driver / 03-2008 / 7.15.11.7432 A / Version: 141.01M

This was taken from their support page as of June 10th, 2009. They have not released an update to their OEM of this driver for well over a year.

AND... I have even submitted support tickets asking them specifically to consider releasing an upgrade of this OEM driver to address problems with games like Second Life that crash because of it.

Soooooo More power for ZEN if he/she can directly approach the PC/Laptop makers like HP to do their job and keep the OEMed drivers up to date.

Toy!

Has anyone cleared up this issue yet?

Zen Linden added a comment - 05/Jun/09 03:10 PM
In the last few months at the Lab, we've been developing relationships with different graphics card and OEM manufacturers so that we can push for driver updates on hardware where we have difficulties. I'm going to close this JIRA because we need a separate JIRA for each particular card or OEM laptop as this jira presently contains comments on many different issues. We'll track each JIRA separately as we work with our contacts to fix or update drivers.

To make this easier, we've added graphics driver info to the Help/About Second Life menu. This info will be available in the upcoming 1.23 viewer release.

Thanks for all the help and patience on this.

Zen Linden added a comment - 05/Jun/09 03:14 PM
Don't let the won't finish mislead you. If we can break apart the many issues in this into separate jiras, we can contact specific vendors if the problem is with hardware that can't get the latest drivers, specific graphics card companies if the problem is with a specific version or latest version of drivers, or repro and fix a specific problem with our code. Thanks again.