My fsx starts up no problem, however when I choose the free flight option the screen loads but the plane preview is black and after a few seconds it freezes my entire computer, cant even ctrl,alt,dele. I have updated the FSDT manager, and still having same problem. Any thoughts.

My fsx starts up no problem, however when I choose the free flight option the screen loads but the plane preview is black and after a few seconds it freezes my entire computer, cant even ctrl,alt,dele. I have updated the FSDT manager, and still having same problem. Any thoughts.

Here's what we suggest in the AVSIM CTD Guide (page 12)(see link to guide in my signature):

 

Freezes While Loading Flight – Many times the FSX/FS9/P3D might appear to freeze at startup.  If the program closes with a message from Microsoft and then restarts, then, there is  a  legitimate  problem.    Check  the  AppCrashView  or  Event  Viewer  for  information  as discussed above.  You need to check exactly where the event occurred while loading (i.e., at 10%, 27%, 82%, etc.) and identify what was being loaded when the program quit and then restarted  as  this  might  be  a  clue  as  to  what  went  wrong.    If  it  happened  while  loading terrain, it could be a corrupted installation of an add-on or missing textures. If the program freezes  at  say 27% for  two  or three  minutes,  then,  most  likely  a  Windows  program  is running  in  the  background  and  using  all  the  resources  to  load  your  flight.    One  of  the biggest culprits is Internet Explorer not completely shutting down.  You can go into the Task Manager,  look  under  the  processes  tab,  and  close  programs  that  appear  to  be  using excessive  amounts  of  resources.    Once  you  do  this,  your  flight  plan  should  load immediately.

 

If you still are having issues, then you need to move your fsx.cfg to a temporary folder, restart FSX and let the config rebuild (see page 2).  There are other options to check out in the guide. 

 

Best regards,

Thanks Jim;

 

After playing around all day i found the problem. It was the video card, i updated it this morning and after looking at event viewer i found the connection with a code that i googled and one fault i read suggested video card. The driver update giving me problems was 361.43 I reinstalled version 359.06 and FSX works.

 

Thanks for the quick responce.

Apparently I've been in the same boat today and came to the same solution as described by the OP almost in synchronicity.

I fought the whole afternoon against the PC completely freezing whenever I attempted to open the Free Flight window. I desperately tried everything, from removing the Logbook.bin file to deleting the previous flight WX file and the WXstationlist.bin file (all of them being known and proven possible causes of this kind of problem), to killing the FSX.cfg file and recreating and new fresh one to have Steam verifying the cache of the game. All at no avail. Then I tried to launch the default flight from SimLauncherX and finally succeeded having the flight loaded, but... as soon as I tried to switch from Full Screen to Windowed Screen, FSX and the PC freezed again. I then realized that the only possible cause for this could be the newest nVidia driver I installed late last night.

 

Indeed, after removing version 361.43 and reinstalling version 359.06 the problem is gone.

 

My system:

Windows 7 64 bit
Intel i7 4790K @4.0 - 4.5 GHz
GTX 980
16 GB RAM