UTIL.DLL Crash over NW India - any clues

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

I decided on a rare long-haul flight from London Heathrow to Singapore. I left it at 1.00am over central Asia having departed EGLL at 20.30. Aircraft was the Posky 777-200ER with Project Magenta controlling the a/p via WideFS.I wake up this morning to find FS9 has crashed with util.dll reported as the problem. At the time the aircraft was over NW India. Two reloads utilising Pete Dowson's AutoSave utility failed to prevent the problem recurring.I can never remember this type of crash before. Whilst long-haul flights are fairly rare for me I have flown up the east coast of Africa recently in Concorde without problem. But that was before last weekend when a lot of indexes were rebuilt following the clock change in Europe.Searching for util.dll in this forum revealed a possible problem with the 9Dragons scenery which I have but my aircraft is a couple of thousand miles from Hong Kong so I don't think that issue is relevant.util.dll seems to be connected to loading indexes. But what indexes? Can anyone offer any advice on solving this please? Sending a report to Microsoft for a product that is not going to get any more updates seems pointless.Cheers,

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Further to my earlier message the aircraft is actually over NW Pakistan and the crash occurs when a couple of miles from HARPA. This waypoint is on Faisalabad airport.If there is a general scenery problem in this area then the only change from the default is FSGlobal which I've had for years.I'll try a flight out of OPFA and see what happens.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Taking off from OPFA results in a util.dll crash as soon as the aircraft gets airborne.I'm trying a flight from Lahore - 60 miles east - and heading west towards HARPA. I'm wondering if I might have a bad scenery file.Okay, 6 miles east of HARPA FS9 crashes with the same error. It's looking like this area has a bad file. The scenery looks okay from the air.Any help on what causes util.dll crashes would be appreciated. It's so frustrating that there isn't a way of identifying exactly what is the problem.Thanks.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Some more info...This crash is restricted to an extremely small area. Roughly a 5 mile radius around OPFA airport. I've just flown from another airport to the north and the crash occured 1 mile from HARPA.I've disabled the Asia and FS Global Asia scenery and it still occurs. The chances of me hitting this problem are very small and it's only because that my EGLL-WSSS plan includes the airway that HARPA is part of.If someone would care to try a flight out of OPFA I'd appreciate it just to establish if this problem is just on my PC or not.Guess I'll have to find another route to WSSS. :-(

[Guest ThrottleUp]

Just out of curiosity - have you tried flying around that area in the default Cessna 172?

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Hi Nevin,I've just tried the Cessna with exactly the same results. CTD just as the aircraft leaves the ground.I notice the runway is quite bumpy affecting both the 777 and Cessna. I wonder if that might be a clue? The terrain is pretty level with no mountains anywhere close.Would you mind trying a departure from Rwy 14 at OPFA and see if you get the same bumpy problem? If you can fly for 1 minute after take-off then you won't get the crash.Earlier I completed a flight from EGLL-EHAM without any problems so this CTD is very localised.Thanks.

[Guest lgvpilot1]

Hi RayAfter reading your posts i decided to try the departure you suggested.On my laptop i have a copy of FS9 with no scenery addons installed And at OPFA I only had the choice of rwy 3 or 21 Tried it any way with the cessna and apart from a rollercoaster ride down the rwy I did'nt have any problemsMark

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Thanks for trying that Mark. I meant 21. It's been a frustrating day. :-(I think I'm going to have to accept defeat on this. I just hope it doesn't happen elsewhere.I have a new EGLL-WSSS plan that avoids that area so I'll try that overnight.Thanks.

[Dean_EGTC 57]

Ray,I've just flown a circuit from Rwy 21, OPFA, in the 172. Aside from the bumpy runway, no issues.I don't have a Rwy 14 listed?

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Dean,See my earlier message. I meant 21. 14 was at another airport in the area.As I disabled the default Asia scenery it doesn't seem likely it's a scenery problem. But unlike atc.dll errors where you know it's to do with ATC and frequencies there's no clue as to what a util.dll error is caused by.I did send the report to Microsoft for all the good hat's going to do.

[Guest ThrottleUp]

I notice the runway is quite bumpy affecting both the 777 and Cessna. Sounds like some addon there might be the culprit. You can go to your scenery settings and maybe disable addons that affect that area to narrow things down. The other way is a bit more "kick the door down"-style but its a quick way to check if some addon is causing trouble. Wont tell you WHICH addon however. I've used it a lot to troubleshoot.Ok try this:1. Backup your scenery.cfg2. Make sure you have backed it up!3. Ok open the scenery.cfg and delete everything except the first three entries which are:--------------------------------------------------[General]Title=FS9 World SceneryDescription=FS9 Scenery DataClean_on_Exit=FALSE[Area.001]Title=Default TerrainTexture_ID=1Layer=1Active=TRUERequired=TRUELocal=SceneryWorldRemote=[Area.002]Title=Default SceneryLocal=SceneryBASELayer=2Active=TRUERequired=TRUERemote=-------------------------------------------------- What you are doing is making a completely stripped-down barebones .cfg. You will see no airports in the sim now and coastlines will look funny but its only temporary so dont worry.Save the scenery.cfg & go and fly in that area again and see how it goes.TIP - you can keep two scenery.cfgs, name this stripped down one scenery.tester while you use the primary .cfg. The tester scenery comes in handy if you need quick reloads in the sim (handy for testing planes)As for the bouncy runway see this discussion:http://tinyurl.com/625h5q

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Thanks Nevin but I'm not bothered about the bouncy runway. I only happened to be at OPFA because of the problem overflying at FL390. I've not seen that bouncy runway problem elsewhere.As for your suggestion to strip down scenery.cfg I have already disabled the Asia and FS Global Asia scenery and it still occurred. The only other possibility is a problem with Ground Environment and it's not possible to disable specific areas.I don't want to over-react to this. The problem covers such a small area that I normally never fly into. If my alternative plan gets me to WSSS then I'll forget it. If it happens elsewhere then I'll think about what to do next and I'll consider your stripped-down scenery cfg.Thanks.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Hi Nevin,Sadly my second attempt to fly EGLL-WSSS again ended with the dreaded util.dll error. This time a mere 40 miles from Singapore. :-( Having successfully navigated a different route around Pakistan I thought the problem was a single bad file. It seems not. :-(Searching the web for this error produces very few hits so it seems I'm quite unlucky. However, my FS9 install goes back about 5 years and I simply transferred the whole thing to a new machine 8 months ago ensuring the drive and path remained the same - F:FS9.I've thought about trying your suggestion of a stripped down sceenry.cfg but the problem I have is that I have installed Ground Environment and this replaces all the default ground textures. I suppose it won't do any harm to try it and if the problem remains then it does suggest a rogue GE file but then I have the problem of identifying which one and second, how to fix it. GE is probably unsupported now as it was replaced by GE Pro and everyone has moved on to FSX.On top of that I have a significant number of addon airports, FS Global, Ultimate Terrain (Europe and US) and several 3rd party aircraft. Spending time reinstalling everything with no guarantee it would fix things could be a waste of time if I can't identify what is causing the crashes.I think the easiest solution is to abandon these long-haul flights to Asia. They're not something I do anyway but having recently installed the Posky 777-200 I was keen to try something different.I'll stick to Europe and the US for now and hopefully the problem won't reoccur. If it does then I will have to think seriously about what to do. I'm loath to dump FS9 as 1) I've invested heavily in it and 2) performance is great.I think this highlights how useless the error trapping is in FS generally. If a program encounters a problem reading a file then it should just tell you which file it has a problem with. At least then you have a fighting chance of fixing the problem. These "FS has encountered a problem and needs to close" messages are totally infuriating and what's the point in sending them to MS when even with a supported version they just disappear into a black hole without any feedback? :-(

[Jure 36]

Ray,I tried the OPFA takeoff and it went OK, no CTDs. It must be one of your add-ons, I would think, just like Nevin suggested. By stripping down your scenery.cfg you will do no harm whatsoever to your installed aircraft, scenery and other add-ons. I also have GE Pro II, FE and whatnot and regularly do a similar thing to scenery.cfg when rebuilding FSFK database which resides on another computer. Simply copy your current scenery.cfg somewhere safe and when you are done testing, put it back. If you suspect GE, you might try and restore default textures, there is a "Restore Backup" function - at least in GE Pro II. But I think GE is not to blame. Textures are few for such a vast area that they are covering, so if one of them was to blame, you'd encounter CTD's all over. Don't give up, there must be a solution! I also have a huge installation of FS9 and don't even want to think about reinstalling! :)Regards,JureEDIT: Just a thought... try and move all non-default .dll's from the Modules folder to a temporary folder and see what happens. I even went as far as making custom fs9.bat and fs9.cfg files for different add-on aircraft. The .bat file copies the required .dll(s) into the Modules folder before starting FS9 and deletes it (them) again after the FS session is over.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,931]

Hi Nevin,I saved my current scenery.cfg and copied your three entries into a new one. I then loaded FS9 and from the Select Flight screen I chose the last AutoSave a couple of minutes prior to the crash.Whilst the coastlines are very jagged the terrain has a lot of detail - autogen, landclass etc. I presume these are the Ground Environment replacement textures.A couple of minutes into the flight I got the same CTD - util.dll.Just to eliminate the Posky 777 from this I switched to a default 737 and saved the flight. I then deleted the Posky 777 folder and loaded the flight using the default 737. Again, it crashed with util.dll so I can eliminate the Posky as the cause.Everything appears to point to GE but the only way to prove this is to rename my FS9 folder and install a virgin FS9 followed by GE. If that cures the problem then I might have found the cause if not the file responsible. Does that sound like a plan?