Guys, I don't think the SoundBlaster card was the problem. I just haven't put it back. My AC97 sound sounds better to me so why reinstall it? I flew a flight for my VA tonight Cleveland - Newark in the PMDG 737-700. A big test since there were a lot of clouds both here in Cleveland as well as Newark. Everything went perfectly until, you guessed it, I was 18 miles from runway 22L at Newark. I was decending to 3,000 ft and the sim just froze for between 2 and 3 minutes. It eventually went on and I landed normally with frame rates in the 8 range. I don't know why the h*ll it stops for 2-3 minutes when you're arriving at an airport but is sure does. Wonder what the VATSIM controllers will say when everyone just hangs out at the 18 mile point... :-lol I honestly think this some sort of bug with FS9. Anyway, I've been working all day on loading up my aircraft in FS9. I now have the PMDG 737-700, Ariane's 737-300 & 737-500. And, that's it. I couldn't get Bill Grabowski's panel to work (it did before) and I couldn't get the MD80 panel by Leon Seale/Paul Golding to work with the FFX MD80 either. It also did before. Go figure. :-hmmm I'm pretty sure that my problems were all solved when I reinstalled FS9. Cleaning my registers and defragging surely helped and it also helped to have RamIdle running in the background since I only have 512Mb of RAM available. Right now as I type this, RamIdle shows that I have only 240 Mb free and all I have running is IE6.0..... My copy of Windows XP Home came Friday but I can't decide whether or not to install it. Think I'll install it on a spare HD and install FS9 also just to see how it goes. Might be the thing to do. Thanks everyone. You've been a big help. :-waveSteve

Good Idea Steve, try it on a different HD first.