FS2004 - Hangs on Startup - Old News New Problem

[1st fltsimguy 466]

Firstly my FS2004 is extremely serious business, I have a total of 110 gigs dedicated to my system in every sort of payware and freeware, all the major payware addons, all UT, BEV, FS Genesis Mesh, etc etc.My last successful addon was the 9Dragons Hong Kong scenery, tested everything was working well except remenant AI traffic all over the place, still needed to be fixed.Somewhere along the way a problem is now occuring when I now try to launch fs9 and it starts to go to work, the mouse hour glass keeps flipping and I await the create flight screen, which never comes up, after about 3-5 minutes of chugging away all goes quite....I check my windows task manager, fs9 is showing using almost 50% of my memory but is totally hanging and not responding.Possible problem areas, I wonder about a recent power failure and of course a forced shutdown, running registration cleaner which might have done something, an unrelated HD failure (no flightsim info involved), the lastest install of 9Dragons (perhaps a bad texture file or something).I tried letting it rebuild my fs.cfg, I tried a backup of older scenery.cfg each with no success.Has anyone got any ideas to solve? A reinstall is not something that I relish or take litely as I have so much invested into the system.

[Opa 6]

I would try a Restore to a week or so ago - to a time when this was not happening.You mention the latest 9Dragon install. Are you sure you follwed the instructions for removing the older version exactly ?Those are two thoughts which come to mind.

[1st fltsimguy 466]

I tried restore, several points a way back in time as well, no joy.Yes and I had 9Dragons working and well, which measn as you know I had to install, and reboot so something was working right.I am sadly coming to the realization that I might have to copy over my old setup entirely and then do a fresh install and I might be able to get away with copying over the planes and scenery files etc.....gees this is not a pleasent thought.

[Opa 6]

If do do decide to bite the bullet and do a completely clean re-install it can be theraputic. You will have a chance to dispose of aircraft you never fly and scenery etc. you really do not need. It's amazing how much better FS will run when purged of stuff like that.A couple of tips which may be helpful:Makeing a complete copy of your current FS elsewhere is a great idea - if for no other reason, it serves as a reference to what you had and various tweaks you had made.Be very sure you have a backup copy your FS9.cfg file as you may have tweaked it also and you can use the copy to add those tweaks back into the new one.Use the uninstall routine to uninstall any aircraft and sceneries that provided an uninstall routine. Don't just delete them. They may have written data to the registry which the uninstall routine should remove.After uninstalling FS2004 - double and triple check all folders for files (some may be hidden) which the uninstall routine left behind.Failure to find and delete any "leftovers" is the most common cause of a problematic re-install.Good luck !!

[1st fltsimguy 466]

Very helpful suggestions, thanks David.