Paul,The root cause of a huge majority of these faults is memory. There have been many of these sound.dll errors in previous years, and not everyone had a soundblaster card. I had one awhile back and I do not have a soundblaster either. It is a problem with FSX and it is random because of the poor code quality. You never know when it will happen. There have been uiAutomation, menu, and others which were at fault. The only thing they all have in common is memory and poor coding.Bob

There's nothing worse than a CTD on final, no matter which version of FS it is on and sadly it happened on all of them, Don't give in Squishy, try again.

I don't understand why there are people still defending FSX and trying to blame my system. I've been using this system for 2 years now, and it's been 100% solid. I've played skyrim from start to end with no trouble, played couple hundred hours (yes hundred) of TF2 without crashes, played stalker series with no crashes, alan wake just recently, couple of hundred ours of heroes of newerth.ALL OTHER GAMES RUN GREAT. EXCEPT FOR FSX.Yes turning off 90% off dlls and every other program on your PC while carefully carassing FSX might decrease the odds of crashing but it will never go away. Everytime I have good hope and up until now I've had a couple of good flights - but all of them are to no avail when it crashes like this on final. I don't want to make a new flight anymore if I can't finish it.

ALL OTHER GAMES RUN GREAT. EXCEPT FOR FSX.

FSX AIN'T OTHER GAMES.

I don't want to make a new flight anymore if I can't finish it.

I think you just best give up.

I don't understand why there are people still defending FSX and trying to blame my system. I've been using this system for 2 years now, and it's been 100% solid. I've played skyrim from start to end with no trouble, played couple hundred hours (yes hundred) of TF2 without crashes, played stalker series with no crashes, alan wake just recently, couple of hundred ours of heroes of newerth.ALL OTHER GAMES RUN GREAT. EXCEPT FOR FSX.Yes turning off 90% off dlls and every other program on your PC while carefully carassing FSX might decrease the odds of crashing but it will never go away. Everytime I have good hope and up until now I've had a couple of good flights - but all of them are to no avail when it crashes like this on final. I don't want to make a new flight anymore if I can't finish it.

It's not your system. Yes there are times when dll's can conflict or a bug in the driver, but it has been known for years that FSX has issues. If the developers at LM would talk to you, I will guarantee that they would tell you the faults of the code. This is exactly why so many are interested in P3D. They are just tired of the issues. Granted it will be awhile before most of the common popular add-ons will be available for P3D, although some have made many of the work but not without there own set of problems. Just give it a year and I believe that we will have a sim that will work well along with the popular add-ons. ORBX already sees the opportunity. Company's like this just don't throw their hat in the ring on a whim. I have learned to do short flights with FSX as doing so has cut down on the crash's considerably.Bob

FSX AIN'T OTHER GAMES.

Irrelevant, everyone always blames the users' PC while it's not the users PC. My system is solid yet FSX crashes, regardless of whether its like other games or not.I don't even have many addons installed. Only 2 PMDG a/c, couple of caranado and a2a simulation. + REX, world of AI and fspassengerx.Also sound.dll doens't sound like addons fault or whatever

It's not your system. Yes there are times when dll's can conflict or a bug in the driver, but it has been known for years that FSX has issues. If the developers at LM would talk to you, I will guarantee that they would tell you the faults of the code. This is exactly why so many are interested in P3D. They are just tired of the issues. Granted it will be awhile before most of the common popular add-ons will be available for P3D, although some have made many of the work but not without there own set of problems. Just give it a year and I believe that we will have a sim that will work well along with the popular add-ons. ORBX already sees the opportunity. Company's like this just don't throw their hat in the ring on a whim. I have learned to do short flights with FSX as doing so has cut down on the crash's considerably.Bob

Let's hope so. I already saw ground services X receiving an update to support P3D.Btw I believe <2h flight is a relatively short flight, especially when flying jets.

fspassengerx.

See, there is one of the problems already. Been known to cause lots of problems. I got rid of it.

fspassengerx causes sound.dll? no announcements were made or whatever.Hasn't crashed for me ever

See, this is what I was saying. Some have a problem and others don't. There is no way anyone is going to figure out the right combination because the problem is memory management.It is as random as it can be.Bob

I had 2 GB of memory for the longest and never had FSX crash. This is with a ton of add-ons also.Squish, I don't recall, but what OS are you using here?

Hi,Why not take a look at Prepar3D?. I've long since got tired of FSX's errors and moved on to P3D.

Tell me how do you get a "sound issue"? Since using FSX i've seen everything, from BEX, NTDLL, 3d9, window.dll, automationcore.dll.. etc etc etc etc..Today, after 2 years on this system with 0 problems in other games (ZERO!!!!) i get sound.dllfsx GTFO. Gave up on FSX 100 times already, guess this will be 101

Bob - you got me fired up!I'll bet $100 that FSX would be absolutely rock stable, if it were not for folks adding more and more products that are very 'slightly' incompatible and untested with each other. In the real world of IT – every system is spawned from a development system before it gets to the production box. It’s tested and tested and tested again, before sign-off. The software is certified to run in this environment without fail, and at a specific performance level. Likewise the hardware. There is nothing in the real IT world that is anything like a home computer.In the retail world there are some products that are more than 'slightly' incompatible or unstable when used with each other. "Bad coding" - coming from an application user is the last thing that is at fault in 99% of FSX issues. Developers will tell you - they simply cannot test for all environments: there are a zillion combinations of hardware, firmware, addons, OS compatibility, configurations, drivers, interfaces, tolerances that change with age, programming languages - and written languages, too, and everyone expects their cheap as possible - built for the retail market pc is never going to suffer any issue for any of those reasons. All electronic devices will fail sooner or later. The electrical characteristics of all electronic devices changes over time. But don’t blame ‘bad coding’. If there’s any blame – blame it to circumstance. Accept that a combination of low 5 volt bus power, in combination with a little overheating, a slightly unstable overclock, a poor quality motherboard, and a non-ecc memory dimm that skips every now because it needs .02 of a volt more, and a operating system that the app was never certified to run on. Don’t just blame it on one simple tidy problem - a bunch of useless Microsoft programmers that didn't know their asses from a hole in the ground - right? I’ll also bet that every member of the ACES team would be mad as hell hearing anybody saying that about their hard work. The Microsoft standards for programmers are probably among the highest in the world, given the vast product lines which they produce.Bob - you said “The root cause of a huge majority of these faults is memory” … well that’s true, but not entirely true. Everything runs through some part of the system memory. Everything. It’s usually an issue when one piece of one programme (read addon) attempts to write to a memory address that is already in use by another programme (again – read ‘addon’). Win7 does a pretty good job of fault tracking, and memory management, but it can’t always do so, and not all addons are so perfect that they don’t make errors. That doesn’t mean that Squishy’s fault is or is not caused by FSX. It can be any running process that can do this. There’s a lot of processes going on in a modern pc, and Squishy’s problem might well not be his sound.dll – but as an IT sysadmin for a lot of years – that’s where I would start.It’s very easy to be an armchair expert in this hobby. The forums are full of "Most likely".. "You could try...", "maybe it's..", "Get rid of Bufferp...", "Delete your..."This is why the devs steer clear of these forums. (Some don't, to their peril - and you know who they are - and it's always an unpleasant discussion that most often gets locked by the mods). Folks get really fired up about their prized hobbies!

Bob - you got me fired up!I'll bet $100 that FSX would be absolutely rock stable, if it were not for folks adding more and more products that are very 'slightly' incompatible and untested with each other. In the real world of IT – every system is spawned from a development system before it gets to the production box. It’s tested and tested and tested again, before sign-off. The software is certified to run in this environment without fail, and at a specific performance level. Likewise the hardware. There is nothing in the real IT world that is anything like a home computer.In the retail world there are some products that are more than 'slightly' incompatible or unstable when used with each other. "Bad coding" - coming from an application user is the last thing that is at fault in 99% of FSX issues. Developers will tell you - they simply cannot test for all environments: there are a zillion combinations of hardware, firmware, addons, OS compatibility, configurations, drivers, interfaces, tolerances that change with age, programming languages - and written languages, too, and everyone expects their cheap as possible - built for the retail market pc is never going to suffer any issue for any of those reasons. All electronic devices will fail sooner or later. The electrical characteristics of all electronic devices changes over time. But don’t blame ‘bad coding’. If there’s any blame – blame it to circumstance. Accept that a combination of low 5 volt bus power, in combination with a little overheating, a slightly unstable overclock, a poor quality motherboard, and a non-ecc memory dimm that skips every now because it needs .02 of a volt more, and a operating system that the app was never certified to run on. Don’t just blame it on one simple tidy problem - a bunch of useless Microsoft programmers that didn't know their asses from a hole in the ground - right? I’ll also bet that every member of the ACES team would be mad as hell hearing anybody saying that about their hard work. The Microsoft standards for programmers are probably among the highest in the world, given the vast product lines which they produce.Bob - you said “The root cause of a huge majority of these faults is memory” … well that’s true, but not entirely true. Everything runs through some part of the system memory. Everything. It’s usually an issue when one piece of one programme (read addon) attempts to write to a memory address that is already in use by another programme (again – read ‘addon’). Win7 does a pretty good job of fault tracking, and memory management, but it can’t always do so, and not all addons are so perfect that they don’t make errors. That doesn’t mean that Squishy’s fault is or is not caused by FSX. It can be any running process that can do this. There’s a lot of processes going on in a modern pc, and Squishy’s problem might well not be his sound.dll – but as an IT sysadmin for a lot of years – that’s where I would start.It’s very easy to be an armchair expert in this hobby. The forums are full of "Most likely".. "You could try...", "maybe it's..", "Get rid of Bufferp...", "Delete your..."This is why the devs steer clear of these forums. (Some don't, to their peril - and you know who they are - and it's always an unpleasant discussion that most often gets locked by the mods). Folks get really fired up about their prized hobbies!

Paul, I did not mean to fire you up, and yes it is much more complex than what I had stated. I will agree with you 100% that the testing is literally impossible to insure compatibility with the diverse set of hardware, drivers, add-ons and the like, but even those whom have had simple setups i.e. mostly default in FSX have even had issues. Most of these issues were after a considerable length of time. So what can be factored in with the time element? If it works for an hour, why does it not work for 2 hours. Ok, maybe something overheated, I don't know. Do a search on "crash, fsx, dll". It is enormous. We all have had them and I personally have learned to beat the odds by doing short flights. I still have them but not near as many. Just when you think you found the problem, here it comes again. I have run games for hours on end where my processor is running right at the limits. I mean pushing everything to the max and not had any problems. Games which are as cpu and graphic intensive as FSX and no problems. So, what is it that is different? It has to be the code, it has to be. I had issues in XP 32 , XP64, Vista Win 7 32 and 64. I guess you really can't blame the OS, but I could be wrong but unlikely. This is why I am interested in P3D. I have had it. I have messed with this sim since it's infancy and I at least found something that is showing a little hope.Bob

Yeah - I agree with you on nearly everything you say in these forums, Bob, but I'm a (partial) programmer too, and worked in IT for a long time. At the College (where I worked) we had between twenty and thirty-five developers, and they all went through a considerable testing process before they were hired. The bad ones just fade out of sight. I cannot believe for one second, that the senior programmers and system analysts at MS are anything but the best in the industry, and set the highest standards for their employees. In FSX we're dealing with a huge number of variables, and they simply cannot be documented. Most often found there's a 'simple, quick' answer when something has failed, and quite often the issue is between the brain and the keyboard! (In my case quite often..) but in order for any of us users to diagnose it - in the degree where one could say it's "bad coding" one has to be a programmer and have access to that code. Anything less is a guess, and is a diservice to those guys and gals. Now, of course, certainly LM are going to find out and are going to 'modernize' it, but I'll bet it will make a bunch of addons unusable, as they will not be looking to make it for the fiscal convenience of the FS9 group.Yup - I'm seriously looking at P3D, too, Bob. Probably this next week, I just have to follow your lead in the P3D forum!!!In respect of Squishy's issue - I think these things (which we all experience) are mostly due to the extraordinary lengths that Microsoft has gone to (over the years) in keeping the FlightSim backwardly compatible, but FSX was never tested on Windows7. That's why the UIAutomationCore.dll rears it's head every now and then. Some spurious person actually spread the fallacy that one should install the Vista version in the Sytem32 folder - replacing the default Win7 files!...and - yeah - same vein, Word Not Allowed and Squishy - FSPassengers has long been gone from my box, too.

Yeah - I agree with you on nearly everything you say in these forums, Bob, but I'm a (partial) programmer too, and worked in IT for a long time. At the College (where I worked) we had between twenty and thirty-five developers, and they all went through a considerable testing process before they were hired. The bad ones just fade out of sight. I cannot believe for one second, that the senior programmers and system analysts at MS are anything but the best in the industry, and set the highest standards for their employees. In FSX we're dealing with a huge number of variables, and they simply cannot be documented. Most often found there's a 'simple, quick' answer when something has failed, and quite often the issue is between the brain and the keyboard! (In my case quite often..) but in order for any of us users to diagnose it - in the degree where one could say it's "bad coding" one has to be a programmer and have access to that code. Anything less is a guess, and is a diservice to those guys and gals. Now, of course, certainly LM are going to find out and are going to 'modernize' it, but I'll bet it will make a bunch of addons unusable, as they will not be looking to make it for the fiscal convenience of the FS9 group.Yup - I'm seriously looking at P3D, too, Bob. Probably this next week, I just have to follow your lead in the P3D forum!!!In respect of Squishy's issue - I think these things (which we all experience) are mostly due to the extraordinary lengths that Microsoft has gone to (over the years) in keeping the FlightSim backwardly compatible, but FSX was never tested on Windows7. That's why the UIAutomationCore.dll rears it's head every now and then. Some spurious person actually spread the fallacy that one should install the Vista version in the Sytem32 folder - replacing the default Win7 files!...and - yeah - same vein, Word Not Allowed and Squishy - FSPassengers has long been gone from my box, too.

Hi Paul,Thanks for the nice comments. I too did development. Mostly client server 2 tier and some 3 tier stuff. Believe it or not, solid code is only as good as the tools used to create the code, not to forget of course the choices of a particular design. Many times the tool or the library used for any particular task is faulty or inadequate. This fault was, many times, in my experience, not easy to find since you are working at a much higher level during development. So much today is hidden from the developer because of the abstract level they must develop within. I really can't blame the developers for all intent and purposes, but I will speculate that there was not enough testing and a design which was half baked and could not be completely addressed. Many times this is driven by the accountants and not the dev team. Testing as you pointed out is as critical as the design. If every product was budgeted for extreme testing and time allotted to make the corrections, a better product will always prevail, but the cost to do thorough testing is enormous. Products like FSX have to be released with only minimal testing due to the vast array of hardware available. There is no way a test bed can be setup to cover it all. So much has changed I am sure since I was doing development, but I do remember every six months some braniac would come out with a new development methodology that was going to solve everything, just when you were getting comfortable with the current one.I can tell you one thing that is food for thought. Way way back when the cost of physical memory was incredibly high, code was much tighter. it had to be. Now that memory is cheap, no reason to have to spend a lot of time writing good solid lean code.Bob