I started up FS9 this afternoon and after receiving the error message "Scenery read error. Attempting to open a nonexistent directory: Click ok to continue" my flight did load, but all the terrain was missing - just brown and grey patches instead of my nice ground textures. No AI traffic at any airports either. Very odd. And after half an hour very worrying as nothing I did corrected it. I spent ages searching on line, but couldn't find any references to this in FS9, just FSX, and no solutions to people's cries for help... I began to think my simming days were over (when I read in one thread that wiping the drive and reinstalling FSX hadn't helped!!).Thought I'd post this in case it helps someone else, but I did track down the problem. The first entries in the scenery.cfg file had been altered (though can't think by what - not by me at any rate). The first two entries must be like this:[General]Title=FS9 World SceneryDescription=FS9 Scenery DataClean_on_Exit=FALSE[Area.001]Title=Default TerrainTexture_ID=1Layer=1Active=TRUERequired=TRUELocal=Scenery\World[Area.002]Title=Default SceneryLocal=Scenery\BASELayer=2Active=TRUERequired=TRUEetc.........The line "Texture_ID=1" is explained thus:Texture_ID=0 and Texture_ID=1 are special settings that should not be changed. Texture_ID=0 sets the global default texture directory to be searched if the requested texture cannot be found from the given path. This is also the location of global textures that have no other directory to reside in. Texture_ID=1 is the default terrain texture directory.Also, the area number and the layer number should match - a very useful programme called scenery_align (in AVSIM as scnaln11_159762.zip) to do this instantly (it has other great features too).I hope, in my relief to have FS9 back again, that this post points someone in the right direction in the future.Martin S.

NB. If the problem reoccurs, search the scenery.cfg file for any instances of the line "Texture_ID=1" in 3rd. party sceneries and delete them (make a backup copy of the scenery.cfg file first, of course)..

Great Tip Martin !! :( I had never noticed that line in my scenery.cfg before.Thanks for sharing your experience.