NVIDIA drivers appear to be causing problems with the Second Life viewer

This article is part of the Extended Second Life Knowledge Base that includes advanced and specialized information. This information was originally provided by Linden Lab, but is not actively maintained nor guaranteed to be accurate. Linden Lab does not certify nor assume any responsibility for this information.

See the official Second Life Knowledge Base for the most current information.

We've noticed that users of NVIDIA graphics cards sometimes experience driver-related problems. After installing the latest NVIDIA drivers, they've found that the Second Life® viewer crashes with an error message that states: "Second Life is unable to run because your video card drivers did not install properly, are out of date, or are for unsupported hardware." To the best of our knowledge, this appears to be a problem with the NVIDIA drivers' initial installation: the first time the install process is run, something fails silently -- a file or set of files doesn't copy properly, but the installer doesn't give you any notice that something went wrong.

There is a solution: ensure that all of your applications are closed, and install the NVIDIA drivers again. For some reason, the drivers almost always install correctly the second time.

If these steps do not solve your problem, please see NVIDIA's Driver Installation Hints