At last my first success without CTD, being a two hour IFR flight. What a relief.I, along with many others, have been feeling anxious and frustrated for the last few weeks, as every attempted flight ended in Crash To Desktop. Sometimes the MS screen came up with shutting down, and most times with logging out because of an error.I have tried every trick and tip that this forum has listed, all eventually resulting in failure. In short I have discovered that something in my AI traffic was causing the problem.I have a 22GB partition dedicated to FS9. I removed FS9 and reformatted the drive. Reinstalled FS9.Reinstalled all my AI traffic (930 aircraft/textures -Aardvark, PAI, and a handful of other models that are all frame rate friendly)Reinstalled my flightplans 31000 lines of flightsDid not install my AFCAD 2 files.Did not install FSUIPC (unregistered)Did not install weather themes.Installed cloud textures as they were working without problems for me when I first had FS9 back in August.Set up a saved flight from Bangkok, Thailand (VTBD) to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (WMKK).Flightpath is VTBD, CPN, STN, TRN, VAS, VPS, VBA, WMKK taking approximately 2hrs, at 10500', GS 396knots, Embraer170CTD after about one hour. Tried again. Same CTD approx same area. Knew that textures were not the cause as I now had no additional scenery installed but had installed the German seasonal fix. Had also set the date of the saved flight to 23 January 2003 to overcome the seasonal problem.Then thought that perhaps AI traffic might be a factor. I love AI traffic so it is always 100% and there is plenty of it. Set the AI to 0% on settings page. NO CTD!Installed AFCAD2 files. NO CTDInstalled FSUIPC. NO CTDInstalled weather themes. NO CTD.Reset AI to 100%.CTD again at about same area.Decided that there was something wrong with some textures on some AI aircraft. Have spent the last week reformatting every texture to DXT3 with no mipmaps, using DXT3bmp.exe This assumption was obviously incorrect, but it also gave me the chance to clean up some rubbish and toss out a few aircraft that were marginal.Flew again yesterday with 100% AI and CTD in same area. Total disappointment. Completely disillusioned about FS9. My only perverse comfort has been knowing that I am not alone with this problem.There is an excellent new tool called AI traffic analyzer which I tried to help identify my rogue aircraft. It is avaliable at http://aita2004.pvdveen.net/and is about 1500kbInitially I thought it would identify my aircraft problem and I went off on a wild goose chase, but seemingly CTD stopped the aircraft being registered by AI traffic analyzer.Fresh from some sleep I decided to use one of the aircraft listed by AI Traffic Analyzer, knowing that it was an okay aircraft. Used Aardvark B737-400 with Sky Net Asia texture. Made a backup of my flightplans. Using Excel, I changed every 31000 listing on my flightplans to this one aircraft.Used TTools to recompile the flightplans. Reloaded. Voila! No CTD. A complete and satisfactory flight. AI aircraft all around me. Hot and humid weather theme, clouds, light winds, GPS, satisfactory ILS landing, taxied to gates, planes taking off and landing. Just as it was always supposed to be.Seemingly a model has not transferred well from FS2002. I now have to find the culprit aircraft so will be doing some extensive testing over the next few days.In the meantime I hope that the 0% AI aircraft idea and a trial with one aircraft that definitely works such as the AIA B737-400 might help you.My system is not a fast one. AMD1700+, 2 harddrives/8 partitions, 560Mb memory, Nvidia 4200 Video card, Windows 2000 Pro OSCheersMike

This whole CTD thing is actually quite perverse when you consider all the threads. There are so many theories floating around now and when the subject first came up a few months ago, I was feeling quite smug and relieved that this was not happening to me.However, things changed a week ago and I have encountered this dreaded CTD on more than a few occassions, BUT, only when flying in the northern hemishere.The problem has to be embedded deep within FS as demonstrated by the numerous theories, I myself suspected it may be the Fscene textures for example. Another one that was interesting was something to do with the FS timezones. So who knows, but as an aside I have NEVER used AI, so that cannot be the reasons for my problems. Maybe Microsoft will come up with an answer to the problem, but I am not holding my breath on this one and am now looking forward to a more stable version in FS2006.ANZ121

MikeI understand your frustration having just recently experienced this CTD thing too. I was consistantly getting a CTD near Kelowna BC and went thru a whole series of elimination before I decided to remove a recently installed afcad.bgl for the kelowna airport and viola no CTD. Now some say if cant be an afcad causing the CTD that it has to be a bad landclass file. All I know is when the afcad was removed my problem was solved. Now the only other place I seem to get a CTD is exactly 61 miles from Brussels while flying from Zurich to Brussels National and your post has made me think maybe its aircraft as I have just recently added a whole bunch of aircraft and flightplans for Brussels. Until now I never thought it might be the cause. I will try that same flight that I always get the CTD this time with no AI traffic and see what happens. If you find the offending model let us know as I have some old 2002 aircraft installed as well. You maybe on to something here I think.Don

Hi DonAfter hours of testing and honing in on the problem I have finally found it.It is the PAI B732 (B737-200) I suspect that I have an earlier version as I have not updated this model at all as it hasn't been a favourite of mine. I did download a texture for it sometime in the last couple of months or so and as I moved to that part of the world for my FS flying then all the problems started. There was of course some time separation between the events and by that stage all sorts of threads had arisen about CTDI tested it to prove that it crashed FS2004 on my system. Removed all PAI B732 and replaced them with other PAI B737 series. My system is now performing correctly without the CTD. I hope that this lasts!If you do have PAI B732 installed, either try removing it, updating or replacing it. Then see how your system goes.I tried contacting John Rogers at PAI telling him this but he has elected not to have his PAI membership email working.CheersMike

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I do not have this or any other AI installed. Do you not think think this is worth any consideration before suggesting people remove this file?Not putting your suggestion down, but trying to keep this on track based on logical reason.As a matter of fact, a CTD that kept occuring a few days ago was near or enroute to ESSA. One thing I did manage to repeat at that time and for 3 hours afterwards was the inability to remove the winter textures if I changed seasons. This was conditional upon having real weather loaded.Funnily enough, after three proven occurences of this at the same airport, I was not able to make this reoccur after midday that day!This problem is embedded deep within FS hence the numerous suggested solutions.ANZ121 >If you do have PAI B732 installed, either try removing it.>Cheers>Mike>>

I have an alternate theory as to the genesis of this spate of CTD problems.If we stop, wind the clock, and think about what was happening in the fall when this all started, you may recall there was a flurry of FS2004 update releases. For example (and not casting suspicions on any one of these) both FSTraffic and Ultimate Traffic...FScene 2004...AFCAD 2...ActiveSky 2004...FSMeteo 6.x...PMDG SU2...PSS A330/340...Flight1 Meridian...RealityXP GNS530...etc etc.I have chatted with a fair number of folks who claimed to be running virgin copies of FS2004 and still seeing these widely-ranging problems. When asked if they ran FSUIPC on their virgin installation...most were. When asked if they had already installed add-on aircraft--most had, and many were unaware that lots of add-ons place modules into FS2004 that load regardless of whether that add-on happens to be running. Many were also unaware that uninstalling and then reinstalling FS2004 to the same directory can leave all those old modules in place to load the first time the "virgin" FS2004 copy is run. Most did not know how to check and clean a registry of remnant settings from a previous installation. In fact, most of the theoretically "virgin" FS2004 installations were anything but. The bottom line is that we don't have a good control group, and I look at statements about problems on clean copies of FS2004 as suspect until proven otherwise. So it's hard to get a clear picture of what problems we're really up against.The assumption that this is a single "deeply embedded" flaw in the MS code is bothersome to me, because I have yet to see most of these problems, even when deliberately attempting to induce them. There's no denying there are some issues--or more likely a whole set of problems--many of which probably are the result of add-on development done by reverse-engineering and/or extrapolation from previous versions in absence of an SDK. Then there are the issues of drivers...especially for video and audio cards...I only got my non-Microsoft (and quite pricey) Elite simulation software running this last week after 8 months of trying with nVidia's 53.03 driver release and then only after running a separate program to clean all the pieces of old driver installations from the registry.Bottom line, there are likely a lot of variables and a set of problems not necessarily related to each other. Some are MS issues, like the seasonal texture blending. Some appear to be bad AI aircraft, or landclasses constructed in absence of an FS2004 terrain SDK, or faulty textures at add-on airports, or bad programming resulting in memory leaks or other errors. Some are clearly hardware and software driver related. The interfaces are not well-defined, and lots of smart people have been able to cobble together a simply amazing cornucopia of plug-in capabilities to MSFS. The price we pay is some risk to stability.Last, a CTD is a mode of failure, not a problem in its own right. Before Win 2000 and XP, the whole computer locked up or dealt the dreaded BSOD. Now, we either get an error message or the program aborts unceremoniously, but Win XP usually keeps the crash confined to that one program. That's a major improvement in the OS. But we need to resist categorizing every problem that results in a CTD as part of one big MS bug that needs fixed. There are very likely a whole bunch of new problems resulting from this veritable wave of new or updated add-ons...and they may all produce CTDs for different reasons.CheersBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V L-300Washington, D.C.