FS9 Hangs at Splash Screen

For anyone that has had the problem where on startup, FS9 hangs at the splash screen, it seems that this hasn't been a problem for users for some time. Well, it happened to me a few nights ago, and by stringing together bits and pieces from forum posts on the 'Net, I was able to find a resolution to my specific issue. The short answer and solution to my problem was to use Windows XP's System Restore to reset to a time about two days prior to the incident. Problem solved. For those a bit more interested, or currently running into this problem, please read on. The information below may help.Nearly all of the reported incidents of FS9 hanging at the splash screen point to two resolutions:1. Re-install the latest version of DirectX (9.0c today)2. Move, or create the "flight simulator files" directory in the DEFAULT XP install location under "My Documents".In resolution 2, if the flight simulator files directory has been moved to a non-default location, the problem will occur. See this link for the MS Knowledge Base article:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;837195My FS9 install has been patched to the latest 9.1 and is quite large. Based on what I've seen, re-installing FS9 should be the LAST RESORT as it appears many have not had this resolve the hang issue. Something I did while running FS9 may have contributed to the problem. I use the ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB card and I have two "profiles" setup. One for when I'm flying FS9, with AA and ANSIO on and set, and another for when I'm acting as ATC on ASRC for VATSIM. The ASRC config does not use AA as is screws with the video. I noticed when I was in FS9 that my airplane and ground scenery had "the jaggies". I realized my current video profile in ATI was for ASRC. So, I minimized the sim, opened up the profiler and switched to the FS9 config right in the middle of game play. Probably mistake #1. Back in FS9 things were smooth as usual and I begun my flight.While in flight, I noticed that my ground scenery textures started to get blurry and did not sharpen up. Now, I know this is related to lots of other things, but I don't usually have this issue. Next thing I know, FS9 starts "loading scenery textures". Not usually a good sign. At about 8 or 18% the progress bar stopped and I knew what that meant. Game over. Now this has happened to me before when using FS RealTime with AI turned on. In that case, it hangs at 82% while "Loading Traffic". To recover from these situations I usually go to the desktop, open up task manager and kill the "not-responding" FS9 app. I've done this MANY times before because of the loading traffic hang and always get right back into the sim with no problems. This time I didn't try to go right back into the sim. I wanted to use the SSW A310 aircraft after it was patched to v1.5. When using the A310 LoadIt! aircraft loader application, I tried to load an existing flight plan and was presented with some type of error. The LoadIt! app mentioned something about the FP being invalid and possibly causing errors. I think I hit "proceed" in my haste to load the plane. Perhaps mistake #2. I went to start FS9 and got the "FS9 hangs at splash screen" issue. I really don't know what caused the issue. Was it the switch of video profiles during game play? The hang while loading scenery? Or, was it the bad FP loaded before running the SSW A310? No idea. So, on to the resolutions.I tried the recommended fixes, ran the DirectX "dxdiag" tests without problems, re-installed DirectX 9.0c, and checked for the location of my "flight-simulator files" directory. All of this looked good with nothing unusual to report. I thought that maybe some scenery files or something else in the FS9 got corrupted so I ran defrag on my main XP drive and my FS9 drive. No joy. Next I started thinking that something in the registry might have been hosed. Obviously this is a dangerous place to be unless you know that you can cause major damage if you're not careful. Anyway, I started searching for "flight sim*" to see if there were some bad entries somewhere. Nothing looked bad to me. Next, I ran my Ad Aware anti-spyware program to start ruling out spyware or viruses. Here's where things got interesting. Every time I tried running this, Ad Aware HUNG when doing a DEEP REGISTRY SCAN. Guess where? My HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry key. Hmm..There's obviously lots of software entry keys there BUT I've NEVER had this issue before. Ad Aware was acting just like FS9. "not responding" reported in task manager. That's when I decided to smarten up an run SYSTEM RESTORE where I restored a profile only 1 or 2 days prior to this whole incident. After running into some issues with video drivers (because I updated drivers BEFORE running restore which had older drivers), I was back in the SIM. Hopefully, problem solved.As I said in my short response above, the best route to take if none of the published resolution paths don't work might just be to run system restore. If you copy of XP is not running system restore, I HIGHLY recommend it. It has saved my arse a few times in the past as well and I think it's worth the additional overhead it brings to the system. Don't just rush to re-install FS9. If your install looks anything like mine (loaded with ad-ons that I should probably get rid of!) this would not be a fun proposition. I know this was a long post, but I know how bits and pieces pulled together from different posts of the same problem can help people solve an issue. Hopefully this will contribute to the solution for someone in the future with this issue. Best of luck and happy flying!Aaron Lee