Fellow Flight Simmers:Wow! I can't believe that after all these months - I finally have a smooth Sim in BOTH 2002 and FS9!!! "NO MORE STUDDERS!" Maybe I should run for president on that platform!!! The truth is, that by carefully reading all of your excellent suggestions to the problem of studders, it got me to think out of the box - LITERALLY!!! I realized, as I was down on the floor ready to remove a secondary PCI Video card, that I had a lot of additional equipment connected to the computer. Palm synch cradle, Dazzle card reader for my digital camera, among other things. So I thought that maybe - just maybe - there were outside factors interfering with the sim. At first, I thought it was the Dazzle - as it acts like an external drive - sitting there waiting for a card to be inserted - but that wasn't it. Then I went into the MSCONFIG startup tab (I do this fairly often to clean out the auto startup programs that I don't need) and I unchecked EVERYTHING that wasn't essential. Then, upon running the sim - what??? SMOOTH sailing! Then it was a matter of eliminating the culprit. Ok, no more suspense...It turned out to be the software for my CIRQUE Touchpad. I have one of the newest models - the GU500. I never uncheked it before as I saw this as necessary to operate the mouse. The two instances were touchpadgesture and glidew32. I confirmed that BOTH were a problem by adding them back one at a time. So, when you are completely perplexed (as I was) after getting slider fatigue inside the Sim, look at the bigger picture "outside the box" and you just might find the culprit as I have. Each of you assisted me though - I wouldn't have thought to look elsewhere without all the input so THANK YOU!!!!

Good tip !Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

Ted, Turning off all of the unnecessary items, can you turn of too many or is Windows XP Pro smart enough to keep you from messing up the computer? Then if it is turned off, when you need to use that mouse or keypad or printer, will they be available without having to uncheck blocks?Terry

Terry,I don't recommend turning off things that you aren't sure about. XP is not fool proof in this way. The MSCONFIG area won't disable most major hardware devices - it simply doesn't load things at startup. For example, Real player often loads a startup instance. By unchecking it, Real player still works - it just takes away some of the auto features that having it running in the background might use.There are a couple of settings that I strongly reccomend you leave. They are:ccregvfy ccAPPany items relating to your AV and any items relating to your Firewall if you have oneHope this helps!

You can also turn these off manually in the Task Manager for thoes how don't know that already. Only click off stuff with you name next to it except explorer.exe.