This is why i adopted the policy of using as few addons as possible with fsx, if ever the need to reinstall you wount have to do many addons as well.Rex2 and UT2 both caused me to reinstall fsx 3 times between the two of themFSX is not stable enough for adding lots of addons to it, you dont have to do something wroung and still it crashes.I tried using a tool for backup restore of fsx and my other pc data, but the hassle of backing up stuff everytime i chnage something in fsx was too much hardwork, problem with that is if fsx fails your backup will be outof date.Fewer addons is what i suggest, and always let those who have more time and energy be the ones to try out new addons first, or else .............

---------------------------------------------------------Sorry to hear your woes, Stan. I suggest an external USB-2 WD 1TB My Book, one defragment run, and a FULL IMAGE original backup and subsequent backups as you install/modify your system. This has saved me already once or twice. Something screws up...you go into the repair system...and pick FULL SYSTEM RECOVERY. Come back in 20 minutes, and you have everything perfect again. Just a tip for the future.Mitch

Now THAT is interesting, indeed. I'll look into it.Stan

Stan,Sorry to hear what happened. But it sounds like you've got the right attitude about starting over. If you need any help (or just moral support) from your simming "neighbor" here in Emmaus, just let me know.John

Great town, Emmaus! The East Penn area is where my kids went to school. Used to live in Wescosville...and now in Fogelsville.OK ....*******....now, don't make fun of those great Pennsylvania Dutch names!Stan

Now THAT is interesting, indeed. I'll look into it.StanHi Stan,Yeppers, once you have done the back-up, you can literally sleep at night, lol. I suggest, you reinstall everything to where your system is running perfectly once more, with all flight programs as they should be. Then, run your defrag program. After that, you go to Control Panel/Back Up Your System/Create a System Image (second down at the top left of the BACK UP page)and just follow the instructions. It will take about 20-40 minutes depending on the size of your hard drive and the GB's of data upon it. Once you have that done, you are laughing! Make sure that you do NOT keep your back-up drive powered on when you use your system. It is only there to hold your back-up image and any other programs you wish to have a back-up copy, independent of your internal hard drive. This way, there will be no chance of data corruption.If you need to recover by using your IMAGE backup, go back to BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM (in either Vista or W7) and merely follow the directions on how to bring that image back to your internal. That usually takes about 30-40 minutes to see happen. When the IMAGE is returned to your internal hard drive, you will have once more a perfectly working TOTAL system as configured when you had that image created on your My Book 1TB. Stan, please note, if you purchase a Western Digital My Book model that has ESATA, then you can use ESATA (and its wicked speed) to write to the disk and retrieve, BUT, if you wish to bring back an IMAGE, then you need to use the My Book`s USB 2 Port. The reason why, is that in the recovery phase, WINDOWS is in a DOS mode and has not loaded the ESATA drivers for the system to be aware of that interface. It DOES though, load the USB Hub...and that is what is used to port back the BACK-UP image. Merely unplug the ESATA connection on the MY Book and slip in the USB cable into the USB connector before you first power on the My Book, then your system. If though, by chance that your BIOS does load the ESATA drivers, then by all means, just run the retrieve via that interface. It will write back at the speed of an internal SATA disk drive. That`s the beauty of having ESATA in your system. The STUDIO line of My Books has ESATA ports. Of course, your system has to have ESATA in the first place. If not, you can get a bus card so as to add this feature to a system that did not have a port already on the M.B. as shipped.Mitch

This is why i adopted the policy of using as few addons as possible with fsx, if ever the need to reinstall you wount have to do many addons as well.Rex2 and UT2 both caused me to reinstall fsx 3 times between the two of themFSX is not stable enough for adding lots of addons to it, you dont have to do something wroung and still it crashes.I tried using a tool for backup restore of fsx and my other pc data, but the hassle of backing up stuff everytime i chnage something in fsx was too much hardwork, problem with that is if fsx fails your backup will be outof date.Fewer addons is what i suggest, and always let those who have more time and energy be the ones to try out new addons first, or else .............

I guess its different for all of us and i'll take the other side of that. I have the two addons you mentioned above, as well as all the other addon sceneries, planes, and utilities in my sig, and am still running my original installed from April 08'. Never once had an issue that couldn't be resolved from simply uninstalling an addon and reinstalling it.I do agree though, that when something new comes out, whether its a plane, scenery, or utility, I never buy it right away. I always try to let a few weeks pass and find out how its been for other users and if there have been or need to be patches issued. It's hard to do that though when an addon comes out that you have been waiting years or months for. One thing I do however, aside from backing up downloads, is to make a copy of my exe.xml, dll.xml, simconnect.xml,fsx.cfg, and scenery.cfg before I install anything. This way if something does go wrong, I will have the essential copies of those xml's or cfg's that I can replace should I need to, without a bunch of editing. To date, I have never made a backup of my whole HD or FSX folder, just backups of everything I have purchased on a backup HD as well as an external HD. I figure that if I do ever have a HD crash, that I would rather just start fresh, plus my next OS will be 64 bit and not 32 bit again.

These ideas are great and should send a "wake up call" to all of us. FSX is such a volatile program and can be very sensitive to changes. A little thing like an addon plane can cause turmoil if one does not know what to do when that occurs. As I look back before my FSX crash, I DID install a few addon planes THAT very day. Did I go back and uninstall those? NO! Since I was getting a scenery dll error, I didn't think addon planes would be the problem. Maybe it was all a coincidence, or maybe something in that plane file caused this error to pop up. If I had it to do over again, I would have done more backtracking of my actions, and maybe it would have made a difference. Who knows?Good ideas generated here in this thread from others on back up techniques that certainly should not fall on deaf ears!Stan

These ideas are great and should send a "wake up call" to all of us. FSX is such a volatile program and can be very sensitive to changes. A little thing like an addon plane can cause turmoil if one does not know what to do when that occurs. As I look back before my FSX crash, I DID install a few addon planes THAT very day. Did I go back and uninstall those? NO! Since I was getting a scenery dll error, I didn't think addon planes would be the problem. Maybe it was all a coincidence, or maybe something in that plane file caused this error to pop up. If I had it to do over again, I would have done more backtracking of my actions, and maybe it would have made a difference. Who knows?Good ideas generated here in this thread from others on back up techniques that certainly should not fall on deaf ears!Stan

Stan, I have Acronis True Image and could only advise you the same. I have my FSX install every now and then saved in an image file on another disk. Even if I do something on purpose or not on purpose, I can always return to this image. I keep the image of the FS and my main System disk (Windows+Programs ONLY), and no matter what I do, I can always return. I usually back up once a month.The thing with this system is, you can restore to any disk or partition as you wish, and you can make a bootable USB stick with which you can also backup/restore image OR even files from those images.It's definitely one of the most powerful tools around and it does it's job REALLY well.OH, and btw... happy 3,000-post-anniversary to me :(

Stan, I have Acronis True Image and could only advise you the same. I have my FSX install every now and then saved in an image file on another disk. Even if I do something on purpose or not on purpose, I can always return to this image. I keep the image of the FS and my main System disk (Windows+Programs ONLY), and no matter what I do, I can always return. I usually back up once a month.The thing with this system is, you can restore to any disk or partition as you wish, and you can make a bootable USB stick with which you can also backup/restore image OR even files from those images.It's definitely one of the most powerful tools around and it does it's job REALLY well.OH, and btw... happy 3,000-post-anniversary to me :(

Word Not Allowed,All too true. I have been using Acronis for years now and I cannot count the number of times that nifty program has saved my day.In fact, I have several OS's installed on different (removable) drives and I keep backups (or images if you like) on a networkdrive from all of them. It just makes pc-life that more safer....So far I have only found one program with the same ease of use and that's from O & O but I still prefer Acronis.just my 2cLuc BrusselmansBelgium

Yup, the FS security blanket of imaging your system is really cheap insurance. I use Norton Ghost #15 for my imaging needs and I also own the O&O imaging system.I do a complete system (all active hard drives) back up once a week (Keeping the last three copies) and I have a separate external SATA drive for imaging once a month and keep 3 copies. Seems like overkill? You only have to get in the position of having a mobo go berserk on you once and write over every disk and you quickly learn the value of a remotely stored backup system. This is good protection against theft as well. Never mind FSX proper, losing all your documents and "papers" you have collected, many on FS matters is more important because they are very difficult if not impossible to replace. Imagine replacing all your internet shortcuts from memory! I have lost to many "Little grey cells" on the floor to get into that malarky. :( Above all remember Murphy's Law. "If it can happen, it will and at the most inopportune tyime" :(

I've never had to reinstall or repair any version of FS, maybe just lucky but in the worst case of deleting something you should be able to get it from a backup. I have obtained the logbook recovery util, just in case, but it hasn't yet broken for me.I prefer a file-based backup to imaging, but I guess the imaging programs these days allow for mounting the image as a virtual drive, giving many of the benefits of file-based backup.scott s..