I have a little back story so please stay with me.

I landed the MD-11F at UK scenery 2000 Glasgow. I then taxied in and changed to the outside view. I then heard a ping followed by a "fatal error occured" and fsx crashed. 

I then tried the 737 NGX. There was now no task bar at the top of the screen and I was unable to right click the scrren anymore and my joystick didn't work.

Is there a way I can pinpoint what is causing my problems with fsx?

 

Thanks.

Colin
 

I'd suspect an out-of-memory (OOM) error.

 

You can download Microsoft Process Explorer for free and check your Virtual Address Space (VAS) by running this tool alongside FSX. (In Process Explorer VAS is called 'Virtual Size.)

 

FSX is a 32bit application with a 4GB VAS limit. If you're exceeding 3.8 GB of VAS, you're very close to this limit and to this kind of error.

Thanks Ollie, does OOM cause FSX to break however? FSGRW doesn't work now either it says that FSX is not running and I cannot import weather. I have heard of OOM before but this seems to have completely broken my FSX installation.

One common issue is if your CPU is too fast for your GPU. I got a lot of fatal errors before then I runned I7 with GTX 280. CPU send so much information your GPU can't handle it and it gives a lot of problem. Then I upgraded my GPU (I runned same driver) all problems disappeared. Try to lower your sliders to see if problems disappears.

An OOM can happen so quickly, FSX doesn't display the memory message anymore.

But it doesn't break your installation. An OOM is always cured by a restart of FSX.

 

Sorry, I didn't quite realize you are having continuing issues after restarting FSX.

Not only restarting FSX - a total PC shutdown and restart. Not sleep or hibernation. Does the problem still exist after that?

I suspect a corruption is possible. For example, a file used by FSX may become corrupted because it was open when the crash occurred.

 

This happened to me years ago with FS9. I was messing around with weather settings to test a problem with an addon and the sim crashed, presumably while the weather data was being written to disk. Every time I tried to load it after that it reported errors with the weather data and refused to run. I had to reinstall FS9 to clear the problem.

As a last resort  try doing  a restore option  before you had  these issues

Always a good idea to back up your entire FSX folder & and all fs related folders under your user directory. Has saved my a$$ a few times over the years due to a corrupt file from a blue screen. 

I experienced this some times and the solution for me has always been to let FSX rebuild the fsx.cfg file.

(if you delete, or rename it, it will automatically rebuild itself when you start up FSX).

Hope this helps.