Have an ongoing issue that seems to be getting worse. Seems this rig of mine likes to crash to a black screen. The screen looks the way it does when it is off. After a while I get the "FS9 has encountered a problem and needs to close" screen. I have a FX55 processor, GForce 6800 Ultra vid card and two gig Corsair ram, Syncmaster 213T LCD flatscreen. Am also running FS Autostart. This seems to happen close to airports (mostly on approach) and never in cruise. Last one was after a two hour flight and I was 1000 feet agl. Hope someone can help, this is a real pain.Regards,Joe

You could have two or more AFCAD's for the same airports which are conflicting. I would check out the event viewer and see what application, dll, or process that caused the crash. I'm assuming it did not crash back to the desktop but to the "blue screen"? It could have been a video card driver. Check your scenery.cfg and make sure the Areas/Layers are not duplicated or the areas are not in numerical sequence. It's strange it took two hours to crash your sim. Probably a hardware conflict (video/sound card drivers not working properly). Jim

I've been the victim of a "crash to black screen" several times in FS9. I traced the problem to my video card overheating under heavy loading from FS9. The temperatures on my card (my current x800xl and even my old 9800 pro) redlined in graphically complex environments especially at night and with cloudy skies. I backed off a bit on my video card over clock and that seems to have fixed the problem.The "crash to black screen" is known outside the FS9 world and often attributable to overheating or an under voltage related to the PSU, even if you don't over clock. Other common causes: over clocking (e.g., FSB) and/or memory timings and also memory module problems (e.g., seating, pairing, etc.). If the crash occurs when a large, busy airport loads into view, then the crash could be related to a texture load "spike". I've witnessed FS9 crash many times when loading at the same time both the textures from a complex airport and the textures of all the AI aircraft at that airport. What helped me was focusing on settings that lowered the texture spike when airports loaded, such as lowering AI aircraft percentage. Better yet, you can often target the scenery complexity at problematic add-on airports by deleting unnecessary .bgl files either manually or through a configuration utility that is often provided by commercial authors. I eliminated the spike problem across the board by converting all AI aircraft to DXT1 but that was sort of a difficult tweak (for me at least).

Clipper, I think you nailed it. Now that you mention it, I recall that almost every one of these crashes happens at night with some degree of cloud cover. I changed the vid card drivers and it has not happened since. However, with these new drivers I cannot use full AA or AsF as I get a black screen in the "create flight" page. When I lower the AA & AsF settings things work but seem jumpy. Have noticed several threads about this driver problem, seems there are quite a few issues with the new drivers and FS9.Regards, Joe

It also happens to me but only when the wheels touches the ground, anyone has this problem