hello, i am thinking of getting a new joystick tommorow because every time i click "Fly Now" on FS2004 my sidewinder loses all RTC tensionI have tried saving the tension settings in every way but to know avail... just wondered if anyone else had experienced this?cheers Dan :-violin

DanI have an FF2 and at one point I removed the task bar icon and the stick lost tension. This doesn't make sense to me and I have no idea why this should be. Someone else posted the same thing a while back, also. I restarted the icon and the tension was restored.If you don't have the icon showing, start it up and see what happens.It's in the Microsoft Hardware folder or start programs list.

thanks for your post Bob., i am now changing the tension settings from the desk top icon as you mentioned, instead of from the control panel., for some reason the tension setting of the joystick seems to kick in more often this way, (still get "? error has occured" occasionally, but not as often)much appreciated cheers Dan :)

Dan, are you using the newest software for the FFB2? I remember when I got mine and installed the Sidewinder software, whenever I'd get into CFS2 I'd lose all the forces. MS released a patch for it on the sidewinder site and it worked great after that. The patch was for the USB models (FFB2) to be recognized in games correctly. I guess what was happening is that Windows recognized it fine, but the game reverted it back to a "standard 3 axis" joystick or something.Hope that helps!

DanI just reproduced the situation. It first happened back when I was going thru and disabling or stopping any unnecessary processes and removed SWTrayV4.exe from the registry startup because I thought it merely displayed the FF2 icon, but after I rebooted there was no force feedback. At that time I simply put the SWTrayV4.exe back in the registry startup to solve the problem.What I did to reproduce it was:1. Removed SWTrayV4.exe from the registry startup and rebooted. This caused the stick to not have force feedback. The same situation as above.2. Started SWTrayV4.exe from the MS Hardware/Game Controllers/Common folder. The stick now produced feedback.3. Ended the now memory resident SWTrayV4 process via Task Manager. FF2 still gives feedback even though the SWTrayV4 process is no longer in memory.It appears that the SWTrayV4 process can be terminated after it has been executed once and the stick will still produce feedback.If the SWTrayV4.exe does not get executed at all, there will be no feedback from FF2.In addition to displaying the icon, SWTrayV4 probably makes some other system adjustments when it executes the first time after booting, but it is not necessary for it to be resident in memory after that.In mine I have the settings in the FF2 Control Center set to high and all the boxes checked in the FS9 Force Feedback panel.

thanks Eagle., i,ll try that and post how it worked out ... I downloaded the latest via.hyperion 4 in 1 driver but hasnt had any effect (not suprising if FS9 isnt configuring the hardware correctly).cheers Dan :)

Eagle., i downloaded patch from sidewinder web site as you said, andalso reinstalled the SW software result = improved interface performance between FF2 and FS9 (add ons included), occasional glitches but easily liveable withmany thanks ., Dan :)