Also a long time World of Minecraft user, new to the modern forums. Used to be staff until that problem last year. BUT not important. Now I don't know -exactly- what's the matter at a technical standpoint, but to the Trid: The grey screen has been more recent, within the past five versions of the custom client. I'm mostly sure it has to do with RAM, because I get a similar screen on servers with multimaps, when going to a large/crowded map.