Hi everyone! Let's see if you can help me out of this....I'd really appreciate it!!!I don't know what's been happening. I got me a new plain cheapo joystick (USB) which didn't even come w/ drivers and stuff. Nice w/ throttle, cooliehat, 4 buttons. Good deal. Computer detects it, I personalize it, FS9 accepts it, I take off, land, am happy, things are great. During the same computer session, I'm eagerly doing flight preparations, downloading charts, plotting course in FlightPlanner, boot FS9, but..well, it DOESN'T boot. wh..? So, I try again, I see the splashscreen, the menu bar below opens, I see the sandclock, sandclock disappears, arrow appears, splashscreen disappears - no FS9.I even uninstall and re-install the thing. Still no boot, no FS9, but still the splashscreen.So, FS9 just STOPPED WORKING!! I can't explain it! Surely it can't be the joystick, since it DID work!Okay, don't hyperventilate. AVSIM forum guys always know what to do. They can help. People with similar problem have re-installed DirectX 9.x, whereas my copy of FS9 only came w/9.0 (bad?) and it obviously helped, but not me. Any ideas out there? So far, I've received great support from this site. Please don't fail me!!!!!! All I can give you is my sincerest gratitude in case of success. Please help me out of the dark, and out of DFW, where my plane is waiting for me ;PThanks in advance, CF.....

The first thing I'd do is install DirectX9c as that almost always fixes the hung-at-the-splash-screen problem. You can get it here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en .Doug

Many thanks, Doug. I'll download that huuge file tomorrow at work. I sure hope this'll work. If it does, I.U.O.Happy landingsCF

and if all else fails:let it rebuild the fs9.cfg by renaming the original fs9.cfg.cheersJP.

gotcha.. ok, well I did rename it to FS10, for instance, and it did create a new .cfg file, but it didn't help.It's too weird... it's just before the monitor "snaps" into 3D mode that the program stops booting entirely and the system keeps running as if nothing had happened.thanks a lot for the advice, thoughCF :)

As I have stated in the past, I strongly believe most of the startup problems/CTD's within FS9 are due to bad installation of video card drivers. Did you recently upgrade your drivers? Even if the system states they are working properly the drivers could still be bad in that one or two drivers were not properly registered in the system registry. Maybe you had an antivirus program running when you installed the drivers. The fact you're having problems whenever going from 2D to 3D makes me believe even more it's your video card. Perhaps the installation of the joystick changed a memory address within your system and now there's a conflict. Uninstall completely your video card drivers and reinstall and see if that fixes your problem. Good luck.Jim

Hey CF............You might wanna try running FS9 without the joystick plugged in.If you can get into the game,there's your problem.Sometimes cheapy joysticks mess alot of things up........Stan

In the olden days I would've called this an IRQ problem...but with USB I dont think that matters any more!Eric

Hello everybody...First of all thanks for all the suggestions. I've tried them all out (re-installing graphics driver, re-installing driectX, booting w/o joystick) but there was no effect, unfortunately :(Next thing I'll try is to uninstall FS, move the remaining folders to another partition and re-install FS9 onto a freshly cleaned-up partition.If that doesn't work, I'll just wait for my next computer and FS10 ;P ;POnce again thanks for your help. I really appreciate it!sigh......CF...

There have been many reports of systems that will not boot FS( in 3D mode - one of the FAQ's that I read somewhere stated to boot in 2d and switch after everything is loaded.FS9 will remember the last setting so you may be stuck in a loop until you manually change the setting in the cfg file.Not at my system right now so I don't recall the setting BUT I think it's in the display section. Change the 0 to 1 or vice versa and try fs9 again.HTH,VicVisit the Virtual Pilot's Centerwww.flightadventures.comhttp://www.hifisim.com/images/asv_proud_supporter.jpg

HII do not know if this will be relevant or not, but here goes. Have you installed any scenery? Even one small file. About a year or so ago, I downloaded a new railroad texture. It was just one small file. I do not understand why or how, but FS9 just did not like that file. It crashed after the splash screen. I found a crash log and examined it. I found that it stopped after loading that file. I replaced the original texture, and I was back in business.Hopefully some of the more technically "savvy" people can tell you where the crash log is. I cannot remember if I downloaded a program, or if WinXP generated one. Even if you have not installed anything new into the FS program, maybe examining a crash log will help you.That's my $.02 worth. I sure hope it helps.Nick

Hey Nick,thanks alot for your advice. It did go into the right direction as I think I've isolated the problem. After re-installing FS9 twice (worked after first time in empty partition!) and failing me again after the splashscreen, there was one coincidence in both cases: I've installed CoursePlaner (unreg. demo version) into the FS9 root dir. So I once again uninstalled FS and instead of removing all remaining dirs sweeped the root dir clear of all the crappy .dlls and other weird-loking files left behind by Courseplaner. FS9 runs smoothly ever since. I sure hope that was the true reason, but I've added all the extra details to FS9 step by step when I noticed the probblem. I have CoursePlaner running flawlessly on a seperate partition and FS9 makes me happy again :DLotsa thanks to all others for their input.Happy landings (once again ;))...CF...

AHH.....There is no better feeling than victory over the machine LOL. I hate when little problems like that appear. I am glad you were able to get everything going again.Take CareNick