HELP, screen freezes in flight planner.

[Guest Philip Olson]

Hello everyone, I hope you all are doing fine post-Easter. I need some help if anyone can offer it here. Out of the blue I can not fly if I try to use the flight planner, if I try FS freezes up and I have to Ctrl-alt-del to close the program. I have searched the forums and have found that several people have experienced this but sadly no one has said what they did to fix it, if anything. Now for more of an explanation of the issue.... I select my aircraft, load out and weather and then I enter the flight planner screen. I can select the departure and arrival airports, adjust the flight level and then press the find route button, after it finds the route it freezes so I can no longer push any buttons or do anything within FS. According to the task monitor FS continues to use between 80 and 95 percent of the CPU while it is locked up. I have tried different aircraft, different weather, different dates, different departure and arrival cities and always the same result. I also can not load already created flight plans from within the flight planner screen as it yields the same frozen screen. I have tried removing recently added scenery and AFCADS with no change in the result. I did notice, although I don't know if it means anything that in my root FS9 folder there are several files that show a modified date of today and it is odd to me that they do and where they came from, the files are: a 12kb scenery.cfg file, a 12kb oldscenery.cfg file, and a 12 kb copy (2) of scenery.cfg file. as well as a scenery status.dat file. All of these files were created on different days some time ago but they all show a modofied date of today and I don'r know why they would. Anyway I have to get going for now to go on a job, but if anyone has any ideas on how to get rid of this freezing problem please let me know I am running Win XP SP2, FS9.1, on an AMD XP2500, 1 GB PC2700 RAM, Audigy 2, dual WD 80 GB HDD's, single WD 120 GB HDD, Geforce FS5900XT 128 MB, all with the latest drivers and patches. If you need any more information please let me know and I'll be happy to provide it. Thank you for your time, I really appreciate it! Philip Olsonhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/supporter.jpg

[Guest firehawk44]

I have experienced this in the past too. I discovered it was the weather planning that crashed FS9. I now do everything except the weather and then load weather after the situation is started. Hope this helps.Jim

[Guest firehawk44]

Hi Philip,Have to amend my earlier comments that my system crashed too. It did but on my old system as I just upgraded my system from a P4 2.2GHz processor to a P4 3.6GHz processor and the crashes no longer occur with my new system. I also had a GeForceFX5900 video card with 256 RDRAM and now have a Radeon X800XT PCIe video card with 256MB RAM. So the upgrade actually fixed my problem. Also, shouldn't you be selecting your weather last or after you have selected your flight plan? You're post indicates you are selecting the weather before making your flight plan. Hope this helps.Jim

[Guest Philip Olson]

Hey Jim, Thanks for trying but in my case weather has nothing at all to do with my problems. I tried seeting up the flight without any weather and different variations of weather and sadly nothing changed. If I try to load an already saved flight plan the screen freezes right after that plan is opened. If I am creating a new flight plan the freeze happens right after I press the find route button, in both cases the route is displayed and then it freezes. If I could only figure out what FS9 does during that time then I could have an idea of where the fault is. It is not aircraft related, it is not weather related, not sound related, probably not graphics related. Come to think of it shortly before this happened I opened the GPS mid-flight and FS froze up when the GPS came up, I wonder if that was related? Prior to this I had a very stabke installation of FS9. I think that I will poke around a little more tonight trying to solve the problem or maybe someone will post an idea that might help me but more than likely I will just re install FS9 tomorrow and be done with it. I could probably do with a fresh install to speed things up anyway since this is the original installation since the day of release. I don't look forward to adding all of my add-ons back in but such is the price we pay. Please if anyone has any ideas, no matter how far fetched please speak up, I am willing to listen.Thanks, Philip Olsonhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/supporter.jpg

[Guest Philip Olson]

Ok, I have some more information so maybe someone will be able to point me in the right direction. If I set up a flight in Europe I have no problems what so ever, everything works as it should but in the U.S. it freezes up everytime I press the find route button. I can also give you a bit more information about that, I fill out all of the required data, departure and destination, I select IFR and I have tried both GPS and high altitude airways, then I press the find route button and the screen switches to the edit screen and the way points are displayed in the box on the right side. I have noticed that the map shows the red line indicating the flight path and you can see some terrain detail and the small dots that indicate airports or waypoints immediately surrounding the departure airport but the rest of the map only shows the rough view of the area. That is there is absolutely no detail to the majority of the map, no waypoints, airports or any indication of the terrain type, it only displays shades of yellow and it is blocky. I think that I can infer that there is something wrong with the data that the map pulls up to display the U.S., it could be a facilities problem, or maybe even a terrain problem, or who knows what else, but those two items make the most sense, especially since everything works fine in Europe. I have triple checked and I do not have any duplicate AFCADS, I have removed my more recent additions of AFCADS and scenery but that has not helped. I can fly in these areas without problems but I can not use the flight planner to create a flight plan either before or during a U.S. flight. Does anyone have any ideas????? Please??????Thanks!Philip Olsonhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/supporter.jpg

[Guest Philip Olson]

Well it appears that no one has an answer that will help me with this problem, but thank you to all of you who at least thought about it. I am going to uninstall and reinstall FS9 and all of the millioms of add-ons that go with it today. While this is not really news to anyone I post this here so if someone in the future does a search for a similar problem they will see how I ended up fixing it. Too often people don't do this and one has no way of knowing if a fix was found or not when they search the old forum posts. I am not going to start the reinstall right away so if anyone thinks of something please let me know.Thanks again!Philip Olsonhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/supporter.jpg

[Forkboy2 27]

>Well it appears that no one has an answer that will help me>with this problem, but thank you to all of you who at least>thought about it. I am going to uninstall and reinstall FS9>and all of the millioms of add-ons that go with it today.>While this is not really news to anyone I post this here so if>someone in the future does a search for a similar problem they>will see how I ended up fixing it. Too often people don't do>this and one has no way of knowing if a fix was found or not>when they search the old forum posts. I am not going to start>the reinstall right away so if anyone thinks of something>please let me know.>>Thanks again!>Philip Olson>I've now got the same problem. Did reinstall fix it?Matt

[Guest lemonadedrinker]

Hi. I've just seen your post and even though I do not know what caused your problems it seems more likely than not to be the latest add-on you put in has corrupted a file somewhere. In your case you get a 'freeze' while the computer fails to find the next thing it needs. On a slightly similar note the other week I downloaded a plane and then found that when I clicked the 'fly now' button on the flight screen I came back to the desktop; not with FS9 minimised but just gone back to it's box. Getting rid of the plane got rid of the problem. You asked for any ideas and this is mine!! I want you now to cast your mind back, back and further back until you remember what you did.Andy.