I can benchmark my computer with a rating of 2560, but whenever I try to play the game through playonline viewer, it gives me an error message saying playonline viewer has encountered a problem and needs to close..

i waited 8 hours for all the updates and now i run into this :(

Hmm, this sounds like an issue with either Windows or your computer hardware and not FFXI/PlayOnline Viewer itself.

Are you running anything else in the background? There may be background programs running or loaded in the memory or additional system processes running that are sapping the computer's resources, which cause FFXI to crash. I'm not sure if it's the same in Vista, but in XP, these can be examined and shut down in Task Manager. To do this, open the Task Manager by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del (you may need to have Administrator privilages on your computer to do this), and look through both Applications and Processes.

Chances are there are a lot of programs and processes running in the background on your computer that really are not required, and which do nothing to help run FFXI. If something is essential to Windows, usually it will throw up an error message saying that cannot be stopped. But things like processes related to programs not currently used can be safely shut down without ill effect. Leave things like explorer and svchost well alone though, as they're necessary for Windows to function.

i cant even update. try reinstalling, and updating your graphics card driver if its old