Team Fortress 2 (Healing rays/Ubercharge) not showing on other players properly

[Pikarya]

Can't post on the Steam official forums since you have to wait 2-3 days to get moderator cleared upon registration.

When playing TF2, just as the topic says. My healing rays animation and Ubercharge (red/blue effect on the players I'm ubering) don't show up.

Latest ATi drivers
512mb X1800xt
Duocore 2.6ghz
Raptor 10k, 175gb etc
Windows XP SP3
2gb pc-5400 I think
etc.

Anyways, I've tried google and this is all I've came up with.
Healing rays and rocket/grenade critz not showing?

Anyone else ever encounter this? Its really annoying when I do multi ubers since I can't see which players invul is wearing, etc.

[Royal]

Only happens to me when I alt tab alot during a game to IM or change vent servers or something. I also get a problem where i cant see certain players if I've recently alt tabbed.

[Pikarya]

Yeah its kinda weird, I've had that happen also where a player doesen't show. Whats even more weird, is if I play the game windowed, it does this also.

[Avanarius]

I stopped playing the game for awhile and then came back recently and notice the effect had changed slightly. To me it looked like the uber charge was more glossy? Idk, but that could have something to do with it.

[Shadowhusky]

This is actually a problem that's been around for awhile. Valve still hasn't fixed this problem yet.

[Kaisha]

I stopped playing the game for awhile and then came back recently and notice the effect had changed slightly. To me it looked like the uber charge was more glossy? Idk, but that could have something to do with it.

They messed with the particle engine a bit back for optimization purposes I believe.

I'm assuming this will be fixed when they give the game engine a partial upgrade to some of the features L4D supports. (such as multi-core support)

[Pikarya]

multi core support currently works, but its buggy as hell.