I posted this over at SimViation and thought I might post it here, too, in case another late adopter of either Win7 or FSX should run into this issue.

 

I finally got around to installing Win7 with all the updates. Reinstalled FSX only to have it not start, while receiving the following error message:

 

 

Flight Simulator cannot run because the version of Microsoft DirectX® installed on your computer is incompatible. Please reinstall DirectX9.0 by running Flight Simulator Setup, or download the current version from www.microsoft.com/directx.

 

Win7 installs DirectX 11.0 which should, one would think, be backward compatible. And you cannot install an older version of DirectX over a newer one. The solution was to go to the Microsoft website and download their "DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer". It scanned the DirectX libraries installed by Win7 (DirectX 11.0), then downloaded and installed the missing 9.0C "libraries".

 

Hope this helps someone in the future.

 

 

Rich

Good info! That's strange though as FSX will install DX9c. It did when I installed FSX on my Windows 7 64 bit system. I'm wonder if you moved your old FSX installation to a new computer after you installed Windows 7 then ran the program that fixes the registry keys.

 

Best regards,

Jim

I'm wonder if you moved your old FSX installation to a new computer after you installed Windows 7 then ran the program that fixes the registry keys.

No, it was a clean install. From what I've read, the OS won't actually allow the files to be written because they are older than the existing DirectX install even though the program in question (FSX in this case) thinks it's doing it. If that's the case, then the 9.0C libraries (or whatever they're called) weren't completely installed for some reason, when I installed Win7.

 

Anyway, the solution, once I stumbled onto it, was quite simple. In researching, I'd seen people advised that they needed a new video card, needed to completely reinstall FSX, update their video card drivers, etc. And, of course, the response was that the advice was followed but hadn't solved the problem.

 

 

Rich