Where do start when trying to debug CTDs? I've been getting them with annoying frequency and with a range of modules implicated including g3d.dll, stackHash_0a9e, DINPUT8.dll and ntdll.dll. I have minimal fsx.cfg tweaks, default bios settings (mb P6X58D-E) , win 7 64, i7 960, nvidia 470 (this is factory OC @ 700mhz) 6 gig corsair 1600 ram (although with default bios settings the ram is set at 1066) Unfortunately I get the impression from this forum that CTDs plague a lot of users and there are no easy fixes. But perhaps someone could point me in the direction of the most common software and hardware issues that underlie CTDs. ThanksBruceb

Fixing CTDs is a pain in FSX and based on inuition, experience, and luck. Yikes!

1. I assume you are not OC-ing? (hardware-caused crashes)
2. Check the Windows (Vista, 7) crash reports and check for available fixes (usuallt useless, but try anyway)
3. Try a standard non-tweaked FSX.cfg (Rename your current FSX.cfg and let FSX create a new one from scratch)
4. Try "fixing" your FSX install from the DVD
5. Uninstall the last Add-On you installed (repeat while CTD-ing)

Cheers,- jahman.

I have, pretty much, the same system as you do. I started thinking that my video card was holding me back so I ran out and bought a new GTX 460. That improved my graphics but did little to improve anything else. I finally started to suspect that a lot of my memory is getting used up. I whittled down every one of the unnecessary programs and services that were not absolutly necessary. Things got a little better. I finally moved all of the programs that I run for on-line flying and discovered two things. My frame rates have increased to 28 from 18 and I am not having any crashes. The frame rate doesn't sound like much but it is the fact that they did increase after moving the other programs to my backup computer. And they were higher than the 25 that I had them locked into. How can this be????:( I have 8 gig of ram and my i7 should be able to handle the processes. My graphics card has 1 gig on it and the system check I ran says that the video has 4060 available to it. My puney brain tells me that I have 1 gig of ram per processor......yes....I know.....it doesn't work that way :( . My thoughts are this. There is a memory problem within FSX that no one has been able to address. Yes, I know, it is a CPU intensive program. But somthing is going on to run our system out of the (here's the catch) available memory that FSX can use. I believe that the problem lies within FSX it self. Someone is going to get rich when they discover how to free up and balance all of the resources that are actually available for FSX to use. *******'s tips did have an effect also. I do believe he is on the right track. The tips I speak of are the adding BufferPools, HIGHMEMFIX, SHADER_CACHE_VERSION, and TextureMaxLoad tips. They did make a difference on my machine.I hope you can glean somthing useful out of my rantings.Dave

Some excellent advice already. Let me throw in my two cents worth... Thousands of FSX users never get these crashes. Just a few and when you get one it's no fun. Like your body, no one system runs the same as everyone elses. I think most of the crashes (like ntll.dll; g3d.dll) are related to bad scenery installations or conflicts with various sceneries. For instance, most addon sceneries install a .bgl for the airport(s) in the area of the scenery. Then, you install another piece of scenery and don't layer it properly in your scenery library and the .bgl (AFCAD) conflicts with the previous scenery you installed. I know that TrafficX installs AFCAD bgl's for almost every airport in the world and, if you don't put the Traffic X scenery way down in your scenery library, you could get a conflict and a crash. So you need to be aware constantly what you have installed as addons and make sure the layering of scenery is correct. If you get a crash, the fastest way to find a possible solution is to use Google. For instance, Google "ntll.dll in FSX" and you'll get hundreds of results from not only this forum but from all the flight sim forums. And, in most cases, only you can determine what is the best possible solution for your issue as only you know what you have installed and only you know what hardware/software is installed in your computer system. You can look at the solutions/discussions and see something similar to your issue and hopefully that will fix your crash too. The stackHash_0a9e error is new to me but I would assume it relates to a hard drive on your system and if you Google it, you'll see I'm correct. Besides bad installation of scenery as I discussed above, I think some people modify their fsx.cfg incorrectly causing an eventual crash. That's why a lot of issues are fixed by simply deleting the FSX.cfg (or renaming it) and restarting FSX and letting the config rebuild. Overclocking is another major issue. Sometimes being a "geek" will do you in as you modify your system settings so much and you subsequently get a crash and you immediately blame a CPU intensive program like FSX as the problem. I think a lot of people have to sit back and take a deep breath and simply state FSX was not programmed to have all the sliders placed to the right, with high quality scenery or aircraft, like PMDGs running, with heavy weather enabled (commercial or default), and put the sliders and run the things where FSX no longer crashes and wait for the next version of FS and hope it is programmed much better. Best regards,Jim

Unfortunately googling StackHash_0a9e wasn't very helpful - no shortage of folks getting this error but few helpful suggestions and these tend to be from someone trying to get you to download a trial of their wizbang registry scanner. So I am still in the dark as exactly what a StackHash_09ae error is. In any case I also get g3d.dll, DINPUT8.dll and ntdll.dll errors. However as it sounds as if StackHash-0a9e may be hardware related I have installed a fresh copy of FSX on the XP partition of my dual boot system. So same hardware but different OS. Initially this new install was on a different physical HDD to my win 7 FSX install and this ran fine for many hours flying the F1 Mustang - no CTDs! Have now moved the new FSX install to the same physical HDD as the win 7 one and have been flying for five hours or so in the F1 Mustang without a CTD so it would appear that my hardware (HDD, cpu, ram, mb & graphics card) aren't the issue. So I guess the problem is Win7 related or a conflict with one of my addons,(numerous 3rd party aircraft, GEX [NA & Eur] UTX [alaska,NA & Eur], Orbx [Aus & NA] REX, Ezdok, ASA, Plan-G, FSC).Bruceb Bruceb

Where do start when trying to debug CTDs? I've been getting them with annoying frequency and with a range of modules implicated including g3d.dll, stackHash_0a9e, DINPUT8.dll and ntdll.dll. I have minimal fsx.cfg tweaks, default bios settings (mb P6X58D-E) , win 7 64, i7 960, nvidia 470 (this is factory OC @ 700mhz) 6 gig corsair 1600 ram (although with default bios settings the ram is set at 1066) Unfortunately I get the impression from this forum that CTDs plague a lot of users and there are no easy fixes. But perhaps someone could point me in the direction of the most common software and hardware issues that underlie CTDs. ThanksBruceb

Typically the stack trace is the top most item. Hence the name ;). Seriously though the top most item is the method that made the call which in turn makes the calls to the bottom most item, where the whole call failed and ended. Pretty useful if you have the code/debug in front of you. otherwise as a user just get rid of the offending .dll

Some excellent advice already. Let me throw in my two cents worth... Thousands of FSX users never get these crashes. Just a few and when you get one it's no fun. Like your body, no one system runs the same as everyone elses. I think most of the crashes (like ntll.dll; g3d.dll) are related to bad scenery installations or conflicts with various sceneries. For instance, most addon sceneries install a .bgl for the airport(s) in the area of the scenery. Then, you install another piece of scenery and don't layer it properly in your scenery library and the .bgl (AFCAD) conflicts with the previous scenery you installed. I know that TrafficX installs AFCAD bgl's for almost every airport in the world and, if you don't put the Traffic X scenery way down in your scenery library, you could get a conflict and a crash. So you need to be aware constantly what you have installed as addons and make sure the layering of scenery is correct. If you get a crash, the fastest way to find a possible solution is to use Google. For instance, Google "ntll.dll in FSX" and you'll get hundreds of results from not only this forum but from all the flight sim forums. And, in most cases, only you can determine what is the best possible solution for your issue as only you know what you have installed and only you know what hardware/software is installed in your computer system. You can look at the solutions/discussions and see something similar to your issue and hopefully that will fix your crash too. The stackHash_0a9e error is new to me but I would assume it relates to a hard drive on your system and if you Google it, you'll see I'm correct. Besides bad installation of scenery as I discussed above, I think some people modify their fsx.cfg incorrectly causing an eventual crash. That's why a lot of issues are fixed by simply deleting the FSX.cfg (or renaming it) and restarting FSX and letting the config rebuild. Overclocking is another major issue. Sometimes being a "geek" will do you in as you modify your system settings so much and you subsequently get a crash and you immediately blame a CPU intensive program like FSX as the problem. I think a lot of people have to sit back and take a deep breath and simply state FSX was not programmed to have all the sliders placed to the right, with high quality scenery or aircraft, like PMDGs running, with heavy weather enabled (commercial or default), and put the sliders and run the things where FSX no longer crashes and wait for the next version of FS and hope it is programmed much better. Best regards,Jim

Some excellent advice already. Let me throw in my two cents worth... Thousands of FSX users never get these crashes. Just a few and when you get one it's no fun. Like your body, no one system runs the same as everyone elses. I think most of the crashes (like ntll.dll; g3d.dll) are related to bad scenery installations or conflicts with various sceneries. For instance, most addon sceneries install a .bgl for the airport(s) in the area of the scenery. Then, you install another piece of scenery and don't layer it properly in your scenery library and the .bgl (AFCAD) conflicts with the previous scenery you installed. I know that TrafficX installs AFCAD bgl's for almost every airport in the world and, if you don't put the Traffic X scenery way down in your scenery library, you could get a conflict and a crash. So you need to be aware constantly what you have installed as addons and make sure the layering of scenery is correct. If you get a crash, the fastest way to find a possible solution is to use Google. For instance, Google "ntll.dll in FSX" and you'll get hundreds of results from not only this forum but from all the flight sim forums. And, in most cases, only you can determine what is the best possible solution for your issue as only you know what you have installed and only you know what hardware/software is installed in your computer system. You can look at the solutions/discussions and see something similar to your issue and hopefully that will fix your crash too. The stackHash_0a9e error is new to me but I would assume it relates to a hard drive on your system and if you Google it, you'll see I'm correct. Besides bad installation of scenery as I discussed above, I think some people modify their fsx.cfg incorrectly causing an eventual crash. That's why a lot of issues are fixed by simply deleting the FSX.cfg (or renaming it) and restarting FSX and letting the config rebuild. Overclocking is another major issue. Sometimes being a "geek" will do you in as you modify your system settings so much and you subsequently get a crash and you immediately blame a CPU intensive program like FSX as the problem. I think a lot of people have to sit back and take a deep breath and simply state FSX was not programmed to have all the sliders placed to the right, with high quality scenery or aircraft, like PMDGs running, with heavy weather enabled (commercial or default), and put the sliders and run the things where FSX no longer crashes and wait for the next version of FS and hope it is programmed much better. Best regards,Jim

You havent been reading a lot of the forums, if you think just a few of FSXers are getting CTDs, you should investigate a little further.

Thanks to all who have offered suggestions. Fortunately it seems I have found a solution something I thought I was doing but wasn't - a windows clean boot - , ie disabling all startup items except MS Services using msconfig. This done and have just flown from Heathrow in the F1 Mustang right across central Europe to the Caucasus six hours plus (ran out of fuel but had unlimited fuel for this test flight) and no CTDs. This flight has always given me a CTD in the past. Not sure what the offending startup item was but possibly the Gigabyte OC guru app that came with my new Gigabyte 470 card - my ctd problems did seem to start after I installed the new card. So hopefully this will be a long term solution - we'll just have to wait and see on that one.Bruceb