Emerald had this ability many years ago. It was removed because the amount of things that had to be reinitialized was truly staggering and inevitably something was missed. Most of that initialization is done before the login page is displayed.

Sorry, but this is just extremely impractical.

Being one of the few dozens of people that has worked in the login code paths... I'm currently screaming internally at the idea of that whole thing trying to be made to work more than once and also cleaning everything from the previous session.

What's the issue with relaunching the viewer again? On a modernish computer, that's a few seconds of runtime.

Or what about enabling multiple instance support?

I think what's being asked for is simply not to exit the viewer but return us to the login page. no need to recheck existing hardware, etc. Just let me log in with another avi - accountant, owner of sim, designer, whatever reason people have alts for. I don't get Woolfyy's comment, it's just a change in the user interface, client side

I guess the main problem for LL is that it would potentially maintain a high number of empty sims seen as active and it would be at huge technical (and financial) cost for them on server side as they wouldn't be able to optimize the resources really needed ...

I presume you more specifically mean the ability to log back in! (Optionally using a different account.) Is of no small frustration (at least in Firestorm, I haven't used the official viewer in a while, but I don't recall it being any better) doing the "don't exit just yet" thing when I get disconnected so I can read any IM's and what-not, before quitting the viewer and restarting it over – which requires that I make a note external to the viewer of anyone I need to respond to, and what said response should entail.

That said, all the "scripted agents" I've used (one as my main "viewer" for quite a few years now) do have that option, and log right back in for me automagically if I didn't use it.

Oh, I should have added, it also leaves all chats just as they were, whether it was a connection fail, sim restart, or manually disconnecting so I can switch to a graphical viewer for a bit — all my open chats just stay exactly as they are, and pick up again when it logs back in. It doesn't allow logging back in as a different person, but that's fine, can open a new viewer for that (I presume that would entail a more complete reset of the viewer anyhow).