A: Don't panic.

First off, you have to understand that Second Life is Metaverse Beta 1.0. It's the infant of the technology.

Remember when VisiCalc was the hottest (er, only?) spreadsheet out there? Can you imagine comparing the capabilities and user experience of VisiCalc 1981 to Excel 2007? Well, Second Life is Virtual Reality first version. In 20 years, we'll have one awesome and usable metaverse.

Second Life feels klunkier than games software or other software that has been evolving for years, but in reality, SL requires much higher computing resources and complexity than most computer games.

Second Life is pushing the envelope for required computing power and bandwidth. The amount of server power that is required for you to just fly around a sim with three other avatars is pretty chunky; roughly the same amount of server capability could power about 300 normal websites (my own numbers and estimates). And that's just for four avatars... wait until we are talking about 25,000 avatars in world simulatanously over thousands of sims.

It isn't just ONE server that manages your avatar or a sim, either, but a coordinated effort of several kinds of servers: object servers, search servers, texture servers, sim servers, inventory servers and avatar servers (these are not the official names of the servers nor even the exact architecture, I'm just listing functions that are distributed across multiple servers at Linden Labs).

Even the client software alone - the view you run onr your computer - is one of the most complex pieces of software out there. It also loves the computer cycles - it can bring a 2.2GHz personal computer with 2GB of RAM and an accelerated graphics card to it's knees pretty easily.

So, as with anything new, developing fast, and hugely complex, stuff goes wrong. Regularly. My first few months on Second Life saw downtimes average 15% of the time. Every week. Eeeeks.

The Map function in SL regularly breaks. Teleport stops working now and again. Sims reboot when you are in them. Your inventory disappears (it comes back later, though, don't worry). You buy things and they don't show up in your inventory. And your client software locks up and crashes waaaaay more often than anyone likes.

It's all part of being at the front edge of this wild new world. So relax, deal, and know that anything that disappears or doesn't work is usually restored in a few minutes or at most a few hours.

Key tip: don't try to be in a rush or pressure yourself in world. Stuff goes wrong, and you just go with the flow or log off.