After a week or two of normal operation, FS9 would hang in the splash screen. Rebooting, waiting till next day, trying different sequence of operation, etc. all ended up with same symptom.I saved a copy of my FS9.cfg and removed it.I removed all the .DAT files in the scenery subfolders.Starting up FS9 after that recreates the scenery indexes, and recreates the fs9.cfg file... and then just had to readjust all the sliders, etc. to my favorite positions, and away it went back to normal.Art

Welcome to the club. I had this same problem when I first installed the program. I now have a backup of the cfg file and when the program stops loading, I just replace the cfg with the backup.Ed

My Dad had a similar problem, after doing the above for him I was still unable to get FS9 to load. It would simply just hang at the splash screen. I ended up trying to reinstall FS9 for him, and it still wouldn't load.. We were forced to delete it all, and he is going to start from scratch... I have no idea what would cause this, he said he was using the panel cfg program from PSS for the A320 and when he tried to relaunch FS9 it didn't work anymore. Strange! I will kick myself though if this turns out to be something really easy to fix..

I observed a similar problem and realized that my FS9 does definetely corrupt the fs9.cfg.Sometimes while shutting down the simulator Windows does regard the FS9 session as a "non-responding" process, automatically initializing the automatic "kill" procedures of Windows2000/XP leading to an immediate shutdown of the process without further notice (there might be a log-file somewhere, but I switched off the error-logging for performance reasons).It seems to depend on the time the simulator needs to shut down completely, unload all the loaded files from memory and write any changes of the *.cfg files down on the harddisk.If it takes to much time to shutdown the simulator the process might be killed an the fs9.cfg is incomplete (I looked at it, there are complete sections missing or it is correct up to a certain part an from there on I could only find corrupted characters (for example small rectangles, etc.)).The incomplete fs9.cfg causes the FS9 to stop the loading process.In Windows' taskmanager I could obeserve that - depending on how much of the fs9.cfg was corrupted beforehand - only 15 - 35 megabytes were loaded into memory.I guess the easiest solution is to keep a copy of your fs9.cfg, as Ed already stated.