After suffering the dreaded CTD since mid December I have have been partaking in numerous threads on these boards in an attempt to nail the problem once and for all. Well I have done it!It does seem to be ram after all. I would not accept this at first as all other games, apps and software run all day long without any problems. I have run numerous ram diagnostics programs, both windows and dos based, and only one of them threw up any errors. One out of four programs can't be right I thought.......well it was.My memory is 2 x Twinmos PC3200 512MB (DDR400). As a last resort prior to banishing FS2004 forever, I backed my memory in the BIOS to DDR333 settings and guess what, FS ran fine for many hours. The only way I saw the desktop was to quit the program!I was not experiencing the seasonal CTD, just a random quit to desktop, with or without an error report and in some cases a complete reboot of my machine. These have now ceased.I am not happy however, having to run the memory at a 20% performance loss (ram not overall system) and will return my 2 sticks for a replacement as soon as possible.To all those with a similar problem, I hope you find a solution soon. All the best, happy new year.Daz

That's interesting. Very early on after FS9's release I was getting system crashes randomly. Bumping my DDR333 RAM back to 266 smoothed it out and now my system is solid. So I guess I share your experience.