Hello All, After reading all the welcome and helpful responses I got from all of you, and after speaking with someone who actually knew some of the ACES people, I've come to this conclusion. This is an old game that was never meant to pushed to the kind of performance parameters that alot of us are trying to get from it. If this was a newer 64 bit design with more recent design specs, then maybe it would be a better product. It seems that unless it's a blood and guts kill the bad guys game, Microsoft really doesn't care to spend the money on product developement. I guess we should just make the best of it and enjoy the experience. Thanks!Pete Locascio

Pete,A whole load of people run FSX just fine without problems, myself included. I very seriously doubt what you're seeing is some fundamental problem with the sim. (PMDG knew a lot of the ACES people and are still in contact with many of them ourselves) Did you look into the overheating stuff? That's really what this sounds like to me.

I had the crashing when using menus also but using the Uiautomation.dll fixed it for me. I also use the HIGHMEMFIX=1 and there seem to be no negative side affects and performance is a little better.I usualy get 20fps around major airports with the MD11 and 50% traffic with UT2/ASE/Radarcontact. I also found lots of problems with the Leonardo MD80. When the aircraft was not even loaded I would sometimes get a crash related to the Leonardo.dll. I have since unistalled it (its a shame as its a nice plane otherwise).I know how frustrating it can be to have a game/sim that crashes every 10 mins lol. Hope you find a fix for your issues.Andrew Simmons

I'm not having a problem with the program crashing to desktop while accessing menus. I installed the UIautomation.dll and the HIGHMEMFIX, but I still have a problem with the program freezing.Again, the video freezes, but the audio keeps going. I had someone check the GPU temp, and it was well within the normal range. I think its a combination using the PMDG 747 with all the settings as realistic as possible,and having the FSX scenery settings too high. The default scenery settings just don't look very good, but I might have to bite the bullet and turn them down some.Do any of you think a better video card would make a difference? I'm using an Nvidia 8800 GTX. I was told that the GPU I currently have, will not support some of the high end cards. Thanks.Pete Locascio

For me, HIGHMEMFIX fixes where when you pull up say the FSX map, or the fuel screen, of FSPax to start/close a flight, or try to switch from FSX to the desktop or some other program, that I would run into what I call the Black Screen of Death, where I would not be able to see FSX, could still hear the engines running and other sounds, but was never able to see it, and never could recover from this. HIGHMEMFIX fixes that condition, and the situation at dusk/dawn where my plane and VC would disappear. Would see this in the PMDG 747 and the Level D 767.HIGHMEMFIX also fixed the issue in the Level D 767 where if you pressed the GRD CALL button a CTD would follow. This would happen to me like clockwork in Vista. I only jumped to Win7 from WinXP x64 after the HIGHMEMFIX was found.The CTD from using the menus, that is something I was able to do with systematic regularity, was fixed with the UIauto.dll Without those fixes, I could run FSX in Win7 and it would crash, and give me just bizarre reasons why, like Andrew saw. The plane wouldnt even be loaded and I would get crashes due to PMDG dlls, or LevelD dlls. I saw it routinely at first blaming the Level D, I uninstall that plane, then it would blame the PMDG 744. I knew this was erroneous information. I do also own the Leo Maddog and have no issues running it. About as stable a plane I own.Now Pete, you say even with HIGHMEMFIX and uiautodll you are still seeing issues. Are you running the EFB mod? And your graphics card is quite dated, and if you are trying to run FSX with max settings with that card and an older processor, it could be your hardware can just keep up.There is a huge amount of possiblities, and one thing you could always do is perform a fresh install of FSX following the following advice: http://205.252.250.26/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1208959973, then http://www.simforums.com/forums/topic29041_page1.html.

The Leonardo Maddog can crash certain other addons if you dont edit the name of the maddog2008.ini or whatever its called for your version. For example, it can crash the FSLabs ConcX if you are using certain key combinations to bring up the various panels from the engineers panel. After editing the filename to maddog2008_.ini those crashes disappeared tho. Its rock stable for me when I just fly it alone.

What is an EFB mod ? Again folks, Please excuse my ignorance in this area.Pete Locascio

What is an EFB mod ? Again folks, Please excuse my ignorance in this area.Pete Locascio

It adds some light fx to FSX. Just another way to make FSX look pretty. Unless your sim runs solid, then don't try to use it.