Okay, here's the skinny on the hardware:Falcon Mach VP4 3.06 processor1 gig of DDR RAMATI 9800 Pro w/Cat 3.8 drivers (no overclocking)2 80 gig harddrivesSB Audigy soundcardFS2004 with various tweaks applied (mostly Bigshot's) to the FS config fileWinXP w/SP1The problem: FS2004 freezes after x-minutes of flight (this can vary from 10 minutes to 60 minutes)History of how I got to this point:I was running with Cat 3.2 drivers which did okay with FS2004 and IL-2 Forgotten battles, but with the Lock-On demo, I had severe graphic corruption in the game. When the Cat 3.8's came out, I uninstalled the ATI drivers and the control panel, but did not do the directory deletion or registry cleanup. There's a new feature in the 3.8's for a VDR (not sure of this, I'm at work) that gave me a message that said the video card had stopped responding and it had reset the graphics. The screen was frozen at this point but resumed after I clicked on the message with some textures missing. Every thing had been normal up to this point. Went into the ATI control panel and disbled the VDR-feature. What does this feature do?Killed FS2004 and cranked it back up and it froze again but with no VDR message.Disabled AGP fast writes---rebooted--cranked up FS2004 flew for a few minutes and it froze again. Freezes with or without this enabled. Since folks were having good luck with the 3.6 Omega drivers, I uninstalled the ATI control panel and installed the Omega drivers. Freezes still occurred. Did some prowling of the forum to look for any suggestions from prior problems, then completely cleaned up everything from the ATI and Omegadrivers (registry, too) and reinstalled the Cat 3.8 drivers. Uninstalled FS2004 completely and reinstalled it. I then installed Kirk O's F-16 and took it up. Flew for 30 minutes and it froze. I cranked up the Lock-On demo and flew for about an hour with no issues at all. Only FS2004 seems afflicted. And there's where it sits. I don't have a clue as to what to do next (outside of an XP reinstall) and I don't want to do that unless I absolutely have to. Any help will be greatly appreciated. TIA, Otis

What motherboard and chipset do you have ?? I'll bet you have AGP 8x turned on and there is a problem with the 7205 Intel chipset and 8x to try and reduce this to 4x and see what happens.

That would have been my guess too. Change to 4xAGP. Could also be a heat buildup. Might be you need to reinstall the drivers. Try renaming your FS9 Cfg file if you haven't done so. Let the sim build a new one. The 3.8 comes with a neat uninstall utility that cleans everything out. Check your program files, you should see it. If the 4xAGP doesn't do it; run that utility and reinstall the drivers. Lots of folks just install over the old; but if you run into an issue like you did, it's always best to follow ATI's recommendations. Uninstall and then reinstall.

I've got an ASUS P4G8X with the 7205 chipset.The AGP 8x you mentioned is located in the PC BIOS and not the ATI Control panel, correct? In the ATI control panel it mentions AGP 8x and has a slider adjustment for the AGP speed. Should I adjust in both places or just the BIOS?Thanks.

Yes sir, I did the FSConfig rebuild after I got a freeze on the fresh install of FS2004 with the old config.If I changed the 8x in the BIOS would I need to change it in the ATI control panel, too?Thanks.

>I've got an ASUS P4G8X with the 7205 chipset.>>The AGP 8x you mentioned is located in the PC BIOS and not the>ATI Control panel, correct? In the ATI control panel it>mentions AGP 8x and has a slider adjustment for the AGP speed.> Should I adjust in both places or just the BIOS?>>Thanks.Do it both in the ATI Control Panel AND in your bios.Looks like I guessed right. The 7205 chipset made me go out and buy a P4C800 - Isn't EBay a wonderful place? lolGood luck

Look under the smartgart tab on the ATI Control Panel. If it's changed to 4xAGP, your done. My understanding is the smartgart tab selection is just a shortcut; but check it.

golfcart and Bigshot,The help is much appreciated! I'll give the 8x reduction a shot when I get to the house this afternoon. Thanks again.

This happend to me also...before I read an article on the ATI knowledge base where apperantly it's a known problem. This only occured in games for me, and it happend at random times like you. I don't know if it is the same thing, but here's what solved it in my case. Open up the display properties, click on settings tab and then the advanced button. Go to the monitor tab and click where it says monitor. A new screen will open up listing the monitor properties. Here's the thing...the refresh rate override must be set to "Same as desktop" instead of being disabled.This completely solved all my problems, hopefully it will for you.

Paragon, thanks for the info but I didn't find anything regarding a refresh rate override on the monitor properties tab in the ATI 3.8 control panel. I found the refresh rate setting for the monitor but nothing on the monitor properties page for an override. Is this where it should be? If this is a known issue, I'd like to get it set to rule this out as a cause of my problem.golfcart and Bigshot- Checked the BIOS on the PC and it was set to 4x AGP and the setting in the ATI control panel was AGP 8x. Changed the control panel setting to 4x and disabled fast writes; rebooted, and fired up FS2004. Took Kirk's F-16 up and flew for 1.5 hours out of Seattle using outside views, moving the viewpoint, cockpit views, etc. and no freezes! I guess the installation of the 3.8 control panel defaulted to 8x AGP on installation even tho the BIOS was set to 4x. I've got Kirk's Thunderbird version skimming across the Virginia countryside now on a second "test" now. Will let you know results.Appreciate the replies and all the help!

Anytime bro - were all here to help eachother - dont worry about using 4x over 8x - the speed decrease is minimal.Happy Landings!

I'm also getting wild screen corruptions and freezes, BSOD, etc, when I updated to CAT 3.8. Using Kirk's F16 and PMDG 737. I went through the full manual clean install procedure. Went back to 3.7's and problems still there. Went back to 3.8's and completely re-installed FS2004. Corruptions and BSOD! I have never had problems with my machine before, but now it's barely able to push 10 minutes out of FS2004 before crashing.ASUS P4C800 DeluxePIV2.4GHzWinXPR9800 PROSome overclocking, but it has been 100% stable until now. I'm running out of ideas here???

I remember reading a few months ago there were issues with this Intel chipset and AGP. Search on the web for i7205 and AGP.David

Disabled VPU recover and things seemed to be better, I think. Flew for about 1.5hrs to KSEA, but then hitting the ALT key caused FS9 to black screen (with send message to M$ box) and restart. I've had the latter problem a handful of time before since I got FS9, so I don't think that's driver dependent. So, maybe VPU recover was the cause of the corruptions, freezes and BSOD's?? The problem at least doesn't appear to be repeatable now that I've disabled VPU recover...

The problem with the Granite Bay chipset has to do with fast writes only. You can run at 8x no problem, but fast writes must be disabled to have max stability. I can usually run with fast writes but get occasional video disconnects.Cheers,Noel