As a new participent in this forum, I may be asking an already addressed question. However I have been using FS2k2 for over a year and a half and have had many frustrations with MS XP home and the sim, primarily with third party aircraft causing the sim too freeze or the OS to blow up. I am aware of some third party .gau files could cause this, as well as textures on a first time used basis. usually after a first time usage of a given third party aircraft the sim behaves, but not all the time. The problem I have now and am seeking advice on is as follows.In my Fs2k2 gauge file, I now have some 9000+ .gau from my collection of over 600 aircraft. In the beginning I found that some guages had replicated on use with _000x attached to the name. x= a number 1 too as high as 2F.I had read some where that this could be caused by improper proceedure of pasting new .gau files. At that time I accepted that idea and went in and removed all .gau's which had that appendage, either by deletion or by accepting the latest date version and renaming to eliminate the appendage. A year later I am finding that when I use certain aircraft and after usage examine the guages folder, I find some but not all guages replicated with the above noted appendage and the date corresponds to the time last used. The proceedure I use on adding too the Guage folder is to only allow the paste too occur if the new file is of a more current date even if the file size may be different. also the addition of guage does not appear to cause this as I have examined the file both before the add and after. Can anybody shed any lite on this problem? ThanksI use a 2.2 gig system with a 120 gig Hard drive of which 65 Gig is used for FS2k2 related Items Orcapilot:-hmmm

Gauges designed for older versions of the sim (FS2K and prior, I believe) have to exist once in the Gauges folder for each time they are specified in the active panel.cfg file. FS handles this requirement by creating duplicates of the gauge with the 00x extension you have described. The only problem here is the use of disc space. As you noted, if the gauges are deleted, FS will recreate them as required.FS2002 and FS2004 don't have this issue with current version gauges (compiled or XML).Doug

Hi Doug Thanks for the reply. I concurr with your comments.The operative word being "active panel.cfg" If so then I presume that if a guage is called for in more than one window, then it would replicate? Or if more than one instance of the same guage was called in the same window,again replicate. However I was also under the impression that the calling of a guage more than once in a given window was considered non conventional. In any case I shall try to set up a test to prove the scenario, for I believe not withstanding your comments I still have a problem. I shall repost once I have more conclusive observations. Again thanks for your replyOrca pilot:-wave