Hmmm ok.. well the reason i had you try that is in some cases that driver causes the least amount of issues when other 7 series drivers did. Im going to pass your issue to a friend of mine see what he makes out of all this, because im a little bit out of ideas right now. Will check back inhere later tonight with hopefully some positive news.

Thanks Davis.This weekend I hope to find time to change the video card over from the blue slot to the black, and maybe that will help too.In the meantime I am restoring my older 94.24 drivers. I can always change them to something else in 2 minutes- the hard part is re-organizing my desktop (spread over 2 monitors).Bruce.

Even my friend is baffled as to why you get the issues you have.. He said try go trough all the basics again, apply a new fresh layer of thermal-grease to the CPU, and re-seat your GPU to the other slot. Confirm that this issues only exists with FS, or does it happen during benchmark tests too? (the hardlocks) ..

Thanks Davis.What would you suggest for benchmark applications? I have 3D Mark, Prime95 and MemTest.Thanks for the help, as always.Bruce.

Hey Bruce,Well were trying to focus on the video issues, so run 3D Mark, see if you get any hard-locks using that.. Now that doesn't involve anything like the tex-multitude from FS, but just want to see if it will pass stressing your GPU in any other way.

Will do, thanks Davis.I'll let you know here, will be most likely tomorrow.Bruce.

Hey Bruce.Just curious :) You got it sorted yet?Take Care,

Hi Davis,Thanks for checking in :)I finally resolved the sound card being on the same IRQ bus as the video card, this last weekend. I moved the SB Audigy2 card from PCI-2 to PCI-3, and of course it wouldn't work :). I uninstalled it, removed the hardware totally, installed the drivers and then the hardware, and it still didn;t work (although DM says is working "normally", go figure :)). I settled for the AC-97 onboard chip which works well, and have removed the SB hardware for the time being.The video card was already in PCI-e-1. I had read where dual headed cards "like the 7950" should be in PCI-e-2 (black) to make use of the dual head, however mine is only a single headed card (with 512MB), not the dual headed version that came out at the same time (it's a "poor man's" SLI).Changed mobo and video card drivers again, the lockup still occurs but only with this one scenario: I open a saved situation using the level-d B763, import panel settings to it, then move the plane in map mode to another location, then unpause it, and it runs until I move anything such as selecting a new view, or bringing up the FMC. Wierd.I haven't yet run 3-D mark, will do so tonight, I got bogged down on the weekend :)By the way- I find I get around 54fps with a ,cfg I have made for benchmarking, and a certain scenario. If I move my USB/wireless Logitech mouse, the fps drops back to 44fps, then after about 10 seconds after the last mouse movement, restores to 54fps. Wierd again. I also have a Logitech G-15 keyboard hanging on the USB bus (motherboard), and wonder if it's too much load.Thanks for checking back, Davis, that was really cool :)I'll be back to you soon,Bruce.

Hey Bruce,Hehe no problems, I don't like to leave fellow simmers with issues un-resolved, Hmm shame that its still not working fine, ok when you have the time, run the benchmark, and we can see from there. :)

Hi Davis,I did run 3DMark 06 last night finally, it made it through with no issues. The score was 5206. I could e-mail you the .xls file if you wished to see detail (I would need your e-mail address).Thanks for all your help again,Bruce.

Hmm ok, so that did make it through ok... Ok im going to read back this thread, i forgot whats already been covered. Send me that file anyway.. ill send you a PM with the addy..

Thanks Davis.Bruce.

Sir you have mail ;)

Thanks- just reading it :)Bruce.