Hey everybody.OK, here's the deal, FS keeps crashing, or should I say not starting. I start FS, the SplashScreen shows up and then it disappears. No messages, just *woosh* and it's gone.It worked fine yesterday, but not today for some reason. :-hmmm The only thing I changed from yesterday to today was the installation of the PFS LOWW scenery, which has been deleted of course. But, doesn't help :( And neither did the deletion of the fs9.cfg.So, anybody got any ideas except reinstalling?

Hi mate, Did you delete you scenery.cfg also? Or you could manually delete all addon entries and leave the default. Unfortunately, it is a trial-and-error scenario when FS crashes, but leaves no exit messages!Good luck :)Cheers

Tried that, no luck :(Anybody else got any ideas how to deal with this?

You don't say much about your setup. Are you running the 9.1 upgrade? Do you have the sim set to automatically bypass the flight selection menu?If you are bypassing the flight selection menu, then you can't tell if the sim is crashing after the splashscreen or when it's trying to load the default start up file. I'd be very surprised if the sim is crashing during the splashscreen because an operating system error normally appears.The other reason you could be crashing to the desktop is a hardware issue. You mentioned rebuilding fs9.cfg, but this will not help if one your memory panels is undervoltage or if you are overclocking your CPU.If you are at least getting the flight selection menu, then there must be a scenery conflict with a bad BGL file.You say you removed the LOWW scenery. Was this from a single folder that held scenery and textures? Or were some of the BGLs copied into your main scenery folder? You may not have a complete uninstall.If you think you do have a complete uninstall, try creating a flight at a different airport. If FS doesn't crash, then the airport in your last saved situation file is creating the problem. Explore all scenery, aircraft, AFCAD, and landclass at that airport until you find the problem. If FS crashes at different airports, then you have a widespread conflict.The next series of steps is to remove your addons, one layer at a time, until you determine what is causing the problem.Start by setting all of the non-FS scenery to False in the scenery.cfg file. If you keep all of your AFCADS in the Addon Scenery, this change will also eliminate an AFCAD conflict. If you don't, pull the AFCADS out from where ever they are stored and save them in a temp folder outside of FS.Try starting FS again. If you have a crash, it's not in the AFCAD or addon scenery, but may be in your AI traffic. I know you have addon traffic by your screenshots. Have you added any new paint schemes since your last successful startup? Move all of your traffic files from the main scenery folder to an external temp folder. This is an easy way to cancel the AI aircraft. Also move any addon aircraft to a temp folder. Try starting FS.If you don't crash, you'll have to go through your AI aircraft and/or addon aircraft to determine which aircraft has the bad texture. I've had to do this a couple of times and it's not easy and takes a long time.If you still crash, you've narrowed it down to either 1) an original FS file or 2) an addon bgl added to your main scenery file. The simple solution is to reinstall FS and then promise yourself to never put addon BGLs into the main scenery folder. :-) Instructions tell you to do this but I always place new BGLs into a subfolder of the Addon Scenery folder.In summary, the problem can be anywhere. Some people are going to say it's the seasonal CTD problem. But if you were able to run the sim until recently and never have a CTD, then that can't be the problem, especially if you are running 9.1. Explore your hardware. It's the fastest way to eliminate one of the possible problems. The software side is tedious and very hard to locate. If you have too much time invested in setting up addons, you may want to look for the problem, otherwise, the quick solution after checking the hardware is to reinstall and then carefully manage how and where you install your addon scenery and aircraft.

Thank you for the long and great reply Bruce.Let's go step by step here:1. Yes, I am running the 9.1 upgrade.2. I am not bypassing the flight selection menu.3. I am not overclocking my CPU, nor is my memory undervoltage.4. Yes, all of the LOWW scenery was removed and no files were copied to the main scenery folder.5. I tried replacing the scenery.cfg with the original one, no joy.6. Can't be the AI since I haven't installed anything new in awhile.So I guess I'm only left with a reinstall :(But first I will wait until tomorrow if some kind of miracle happens. ;)Thanks for your help once again ;)

Sorry to say I don't have the scenery so I can't browse the zip to see what files it replaced.I suspect it added a bgl in one of the default folders so any attempt to restore an old scenery.cfg wouldn't fix the issue. You'd have to find the bgl, and delete it. Look at the zip and take a look at all the bgl's inside. If the scenery installed with an autoinstaller, install it into a dummy folder and look at what's created. I am assuming a failure happened right after install.Also, if you search the FS9 folder and subfolders for "scenery.dat" and search for the last couple of days, the scenery.dat's will be updated in folders whereever a new bgl was added. You can sift through just those folders, and see if there's a bgl with a time/datestamp which stands out.Try that before you reinstall--I know how frustrating any reinstall is--hate to see you suffer through one.-John

Someone else had a problem with the LOWW scenery and found a corrupted AFCAD for LOWW. After fixing the AFCAD the scenery worked great. Guess you should see if you have an AFCAD for LOWW and rename it and see if that works. Otherwise it appears to be a hardware problem (video card/sound card driver) and not FS9 since you appear to have done everything to resolve your problem w/i FS9. A clean install of FS9 will determine whether it's a hardware issue or not.Good luck.Jim

'Start/ProgramFiles/MicrosoftGames/FS2004/Troubleshooting/Restore Defaults'Right, should I do another quick lap of the old Nurburgring circuit with 'GT4' or go flying?Dave T.

How do I open the scenery.dat files? Can't open them with Notepad or Wordpad. :(

HiI've had a problem similer to yours and traced it to the FS9 startup file. Try replacing the fs9.exe file with the original from the disk. I don't recall which disk at the moment. I keep a copy in a special folder.I don't know what happens but my FS9.exe file became corruped twice and I fixed the problem with the replacement.Hope this helps ypuArnold

Thanks for the reply Arnold, but also no joy :(So I just uninstalled FS and will do a reinstall after I get back from Spain ;)

The scenery.dat files can't be opened. They are indexes built by MSFS when new scenery is added. They are like "signposts", since you can tell by the ones most recently updated where the most recent scenery has been added.-John

I had a similar problem recently while copying FS2004 to my new system. FS2004 would crash very early in its startup. Finally traced the problem to an old version of PANELS.DLL in my Modules folder. How it got there is a mystery to me, but replacing it with the default FS9.1 version fixed it.-- Walt