I live in fear!...(and need reassurance!)

[Guest]

Hi everyone,As the subject informs, I live in complete fear!Ever since FS2002 was released I have spent countless hours flying its virtual skies, and at the same time enjoying all the freeware and payware I can lay my hands on. As time has passed I have developed my skills, and learned as much as I can about the complexities of .cfg files, installations, etc. And I would now consider myself fairly knowledgeable on the subject of addons, and all their associated component files, and the various problems that can be encountered when dealing with the many new files that we are lucky enough to be supplied with every day.However!...For about the last three or four months my FS2002 experience has been continually tarnished by problems that I am unable to solve (and not for the lack of trying!). Its not an individual problem, and I know that countless people have experienced it as well, but other people seem to solve it, and I never have! The problem is that FS simply crashes ALL the time. For months any flight I have undertaken has to be frequently saved, because I know that at any moment it could freeze, followed by much HD action, then the CD-ROM kicks in and spins up (god knows why since it has nothing to do with FS!?), followed by the error message that everyone fears 'Microsoft Flight Simulator has experienced a problem and must close etc etc'. ALWAYS the same .dll files involved. But then its not always the error message that accompanies a crash. I can be flying along happily then bang, the game freezes and so does the sound, the result being that you get that terrible stuck record effect with the engine sounds! In these instances there is nothing to be done but press the computers reset button!I have uninstalled, reinstalled, uninstalled, reinstalled. And not just FS. I've reformatted drives and reinstalled XP several times as well. Now my system is not the most stable it has to be said, but no other games crash with the regularity of FS2002. I built the system with the help of a friend (well, I paid, he built!) who used to build computers for a living, so in theory should have known exactly what he was doing! Just for the sake of information, its an AMD Athlon XP2000 CPU, 512MB Ram, 64MB Geforce 4 Ti4200, one 40 gig HD accompanied by a 20 gig, nice big coolermaster fan, DVD/CD-RW etc.Now everyone who has read through this long winded post will be thinking to himself that this guy wants us to troubleshoot and give him some solutions! But, believe me, its all been said and done before, and sadly to no avail!No, what I want is much simpler! I decided a little while ago that the time had come for a new system, and this weekend, I take delivery of my new Dell Dimension 8300, P4 3.0, ATI 9800 Pro...etc...system, (I'm looking forward to being very 'FS2004 ready'!). But here we go...I LIVE IN FEAR!...what if I'm doomed to have this problem on whatever computer I install Flight Sim!!!!I think I just need reassurance!!!! To think that a computer game has reduced me to requesting 'motherly' encouragement!! Oh well, thats what our virtual world does I suppose!All the best guys,Regards,Al.P.S. Any reassurance gratefully accepted! :)

[Guest danowat]

Hi,Well I have had a few problems with FS2002, and they ALL seem to stem from add-ons.In its vanilla form I would say that FS2002 is one of the most stable "games" I have used, again I only had problems when I started adding to it.In your post you state that the CD spins up when you have an error, do you have the FS2002 cd in the drive, I say this because I have had problems with some games if I leave the CD in the drive.I can't see any reason why you can't run FS2002 successfully with your current system, It is fairly similar to mine.What sort of .DLL errors are you getting?.Dan.

[Guest]

Hi Dan,No, I don't ever have the CD in the drive.I should add that I ran FS2002 for about a year without any problems, prior to about four months ago, which is when my current problems all started.The .dll errors are always the same. Module 1 always refers to fs2002.exe, module 2 always refers to ntdll.dll, module 3 always refers to kernel32.dll, and the rest are always the same too, but there's far to many to reproduce them all here!One thing that does perplex me about the error message, is that the 'System Information' within it refers to 'Windows NT 5.1 Build: 2600'. I don't know what this means, as I am running XP, but maybe its completely unrelated...I just don't know.As you have said Dan, it seems that addons are the real culprit with these sort of problems, only I run pretty much the standard 'popular' addons that just about every other simmer probably has, and not everyone encounters problems. Its a real mystery!Anyway, my search for the solution will hopefully present itself one day! I just hope that my new system proves somewhat more stable, but unfortunately, if the problem does lie in a conflict between sim and addon, well, chances are it may well just keep happening no matter what computer I have the game installed on.We'll see I guess.Best regards,Al.

[Guest]

/me gives Al a comforting pat on the headNo worries mate! Everything will turn out just fine. The nice thing about Dell

[Guest danowat]

Hi,Have you tried running FS in compatibility mode?.I have heard that this sometimes work.Have you tried scanbgl?, this program will see if your scenery files are ok, althought the module errors don't seem to be scenery related.As for the NT5.1, that is just another name for XP.I know how you feel, a while back I had major crashes with g3d.dll, it took me a long time, and a lot of messing about to get it sorted, it was a problem with an addon scenery.Dan.

[Guest DannyBoy]

Hey AlI think we all have had some kind of problem with all the versions of FS.(Still a great program). I had the same crash problem as you. Mine was related to the video card drivers. I had to go back and use an older driver version to get it to work. So I know how you feel when it crashes. You want to throw it through a window. :-mad Your new system will work so good for you, you'll wonder how you ever got along with the old one.Hope you feel better.Danny :-beerchug

[Guest jabberthecat]

Any chance your PC is overheating. I had a spell of increased FS crashes over several weeks/months that culiminated into a unflyable day ( on a hot June day ). My motherboard has a temp monitor/software that showed overheating.I cleaned out the case and CPU heatsink with cans of compressed air thus getting the heat under control and clearing up all of my FS crashes. The dust acts as a blanket on the heatsink and there is no way for the CPU to stay cool. Note - I did not have video freezes as would happen if the video card was overheating, I had FS 2002 .dll crashes, but they were totally caused by the CPU overheating.Something to think about.- Myles

[Guest crashing_pilot]

now now,easy boy,it'll turn out allright...besides,you can call dell if anything goes wrong ;-)must say though,i just got an amd athlon xp 1800+ ... the frikkin thing makes me long for my trusty old dell optiplex gx1 500....a p3 500..it ran absolutely stable,in 4 years i had to reformat once because of a virus,never had any problem with it,be it with fs2k,fs95,fs98,fs2k2...everything went smooth...DON'T get me started on my athlon :-mad

[OMillerJr 0]

I think Myles makes a valid point about heat causing crashes as I've had a similar experience. In my case, although it wasn't FS related, it was caused by the processor fan slowing down and finally stopping causing the CPU to overheat. Again in another example I was getting registry errors on boot up and like to have pulled all my hair out trying to figure it out. I finally replaced my memory and that took care of the problem. I would assume that FS like the registry will load into the same memory area each time so if a specific area of memory was questionable every time the program accesses that area (maybe where one of those dll files are loaded) it would crash. Don't know... it's just a thought. Could be video memory as well I guess. Video drivers, as someone else mentioned can cause problems. I tried 30.82 Nvidia drivers and the FSTracker log program refused to run (locked up every time) went back to the 30.00 drivers that came with my TI4200 board and everything was fine.I feel sure your problem will be solved with addition of the new Dell so I wouldn't be concerned with that.

[Guest]

Thanks for all of this advice guys.In my long and drawn out 'process of elimination' to solve this problem I have done many many things...I too thought that it may be the CPU overheating. Checked the temp in setup, and sure enough it seemed high, about 65. So I went and bought a huge coolermaster with a copper core and variable fan speed control. This keeps the temperature down to about 50-55, but the crashes still occur.I also thought it may have been the power supply, as I only have a 300W unit. So I got hold of a 400W, but this turned out to be a waste of time, as it didn't solve the problem.I have also suspected that it may be a memory problem, and I did consider renewing my 512 MB of Ram, but that was fairly recently, and I already had it in mind that it was time to get a whole new system, which as I've said, I'm now waiting on. So I guess I won't ever know if it was the memory or not!Anyway guys, the help (and reassurance!) is VERY much appreciated.All the best,Al.

[Guest]

AL,I know exactly what you mean, I played around with trying to fix my situation for 3 months, trying everything that has been mentioned in this post including replacing my memory which finally turned out to be ultimately the source of my problem. First my specs.P4 2.8 not O/CP4t533 Asus motherboard with 533 FSB512 RDRAM 32 bitATI Radeon 9700 ProSound Blaster Live2 Maxtor 80 gig HD's My symptoms were as noted.1) Program fires up normally and no specific time FS comes up with that stupid error message and asks you politely to close, this happens at no certain time.2) The offending module always pointed to a dll file.Anyhow the solution is to replace your memory, ALL of it.Worked for me.JP

[shermank 166]

I agree with other posters, the problem is likely due to add ons that create some sort of incompatiability. I have never had it occur with sceneries, only add on aircraft, and even more specifically, in my case it has been panel related...Sherm