Thanks for the suggestion Roman. For a while I thought that might be the solution, however my experience now suggests that even a moderate amount of AI traffic results in the loss of these textures. That's weird.The only thing in common with my aircraft's external textures and those of the AI aircraft is that they all employ some version of DXT3 compression. Maybe my video card is having some issue with this? or an issue with DirectX 9.0c?-- WaltFlying FS9.1 at 1600x1200x32Intel Pentium 4 640 HT 3.20GHzWindows XP Pro SP21GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz (2x512M)256MB PCI Express x16 ATI Radeon X850 XT PEDirectX 9.0cViewSonic P95f+ 19 inch Ultrabrite CRT MonitorSound Blaster Audigy2 ZSCreative I-Trigue 2.1 3300 SpeakersMS ForceFeedback 2 joystick

Many months ago I read on these forums of a tweak that was supposed to improve performance. It involved switching the program priority from "application" to "background services" or vice versa (I'm sorry, I'm at work now and can't remember the specifics.) Anyway, I made the switch and things seemed fine for some time until I noticed exactly what you are describing - after flying for a period of time (usually ten or fifteen minutes) I'd start to lose textures from the plane and be left flying a blank grey model. It took me a ton of rooting around looking for a solution before I read a thread somewhere that mentioned that the "tweak" I had applied could cuase this to happen. So, I switched the program priority back to what it had been before and voila, no more dissappearing textures...SYSTEM PROPERTIES --> ADVANCED --> PERFORMANCE OPTIONS

Thanks for the tip, Zevious!!Per your suggestion, I went to System Properties > Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced, and discovered that Memory usage was set to System cache. I changed that setting to Programs, and thus far after some initial flights the missing textures problem has yet to rear its ugly head. I'll confirm this and let you know tomorrow.Thanks again! :)-- Walt

glad to be of assistance. :)

Yep, it's confirmed--All's well in FS9 land. Again, ZILLION THANKS!-- Walt

I found that with the sim fully loaded ie: mesh, UT, planes, scenery, and your sim settings on high you "Waltm" do not have enough ram. At least that was the solution with me. Good luck.