Desparately need help with P3D not starting

[Rocky_53 1,566]

I am at a cross roads with this hobby. I have never been so close to throwing everything against the wall and walking away from this whole charade after seven years. After two P3d reinstalls in the past six months, which incidentally takes the best part of 3-4 weeks a time, a second OS reinstall,  then a complete rebuild following the death of the Asus MB, I now am faced with yet again another bloody PITA! Sorry fellas, I am sooo, depressed. Windows 10 absolutely sucks. I have never used a darn OS that continually throws up so many error messages. The latest straw, which is just about to break the camel's back, is I can no longer start P3D v4.1. Here is the story so far:-

I've been battling for months trying to get to the bottom of frames dropping through the floor when moving panels to a second monitor and also extreme texture loading delay in the sim. Because of this, yesterday I decided to delete the cfg, delete the shader cache and update Windows 10. Since doing that I have been unable to start P3d. Clicking on the icon starts the process but it never gets to the menu page. It just sits there looking gormless! I did manage to start a flight after much waiting for about 8 minutes, once I had done so, the computer starting giving off continual beeps and I could hardly use the mouse as it was stuttering and jerking all over the place. I couldn't get out of the sim so had to close the pc from the power button. On restarting, it seemed everything worked OK in the computer, the issue seems to be with P3D.

This is what I have tried so far with no success whatsoever.

1) Delete shader cache

2) Delete cfg

3) Delete the startup folders in the LM folder (can't remember the names)

4) Reinstalled the MSI client

5) Reinstalled all drivers

6) Tried to do a system restore but alas, good old Win10 decided it could not perform the task

7) Lastly, I resorted to a Macrium Reflect backup, which had been made about two weeks ago. It reinstalled the separate SSD drive that has P3d on, but it threw up an error message when I came to try and restore the OS on a separate SSD. I can't remember what the error message was, only to tell me that it failed t update. I also tried the media restore on a DVD, with no success.

There seem to be quite a few similar reports about the inability to start P3d, but so far I have not come across anything that helps my situation. All in all, I hope fellas you can understand my frustration. Short of spending another 3-4 weeks of reinstalling everything again, I'm at a loss at what to do. I really do think if I can't sort this out, I will hang my hat up and close down the sim. Help would be appreciated fellas, thanks.

 

 

[Nyxx 6,993]

Why on earth does it take weeks to install P3D.

v4.1 new to me with every addon took 4 hours.

Never had any problems v4.1 runs like a dream.

w7 .

You must own w7 still, if you pc is playing up so much. Wipe it and go back to W7.

No ideas to why you always have so much trouble Howard, sadly.

Might be worth getting a PC place to go over your pc because something is Very wrong your end. 

[Rocky_53 1,566]

1 minute ago, Nyxx said:

Why on earth does it take weeks to install P3D.

v4.1 new to me with every addon took 4 hours.

Never had any problems v4.1 runs like a dream.

w7 .

You must own w7 still, if you pc is playing up so much. Wipe it and go back to W7.

No ideas to why you always have so much trouble Howard, sadly.

Might be worth getting a PC place to go over your pc because something is Very wrong your end. 

Hi Dave, yes, it takes about 3-4 weeks to install 150+ addons, sceneries, configure all the sceneries, etc etc configue 12+aircraft, ASN, VOX ATC, Rex, Chaseplane, Linda, FSUIPC, SPAD, blah, blah. I don't sit down and spend a day just installing one after another, I install several addons at a time and fly for a while and ensure things are running correctly. I don't know, I can only think there is some underlying issue that has not been found. Yes, I have just had the whole PC stripped down with every single component checked, following a MB death. I am on my second MB now and have everything sorted up until yesterday. I can only think there may have been a problem with the update. There were two updates showing, I uninstalled one of them but was unable to do the same with the second.

[mikeymike 357]

Well no wonder you are having

so many issues.

really??? 150 + Addons?

Lol

[1st fltsimguy 466]

44 minutes ago, Rockliffe said:

Hi Dave, yes, it takes about 3-4 weeks to install 150+ addons, sceneries, configure all the sceneries, etc etc configue 12+aircraft, ASN, VOX ATC, Rex, Chaseplane, Linda, FSUIPC, SPAD, blah, blah. I don't sit down and spend a day just installing one after another, I install several addons at a time and fly for a while and ensure things are running correctly. I don't know, I can only think there is some underlying issue that has not been found. Yes, I have just had the whole PC stripped down with every single component checked, following a MB death. I am on my second MB now and have everything sorted up until yesterday. I can only think there may have been a problem with the update. There were two updates showing, I uninstalled one of them but was unable to do the same with the second.

HI Howard. You system specs are only slightly better than mine. You may be pushing the sim beyond its capabilities with all that stuff but not sure.

Most distressing. I had to do a reinstall as well, due to a stuttering mess.  I failed to follow my tried and true guidelines. Only install one item at a time, test it out be sure that it works as expected before moving onto the next addon.

I have tons of addons as well but not as many as you. And it does take a long time to install items when you have a plethora of them. My best advice is what I posted above, install only one at a time, ensure its working as expected and not negatively impacting the sim.

First up, does a vanilla install of P3DV4 work perfectly no stutters or bad behaviours, because it should be flawless.

I would say this Howard, I also actually install my addons into a dummy folder, I then copy the items to their required locations, then I test out the addon thoroughly and the sim thoroughly before moving to a new item.

My first experience everything was working flawlessly, I got careless, installed a dozen planes at once some not fully compatible yet, this was a big mistake my sim started behaving badly, forcing in the end a reinstall from scratch.

I am now slowly and steadily adding sceneries and planes and ensuring the sim works perfectly before attempting a new addon. I monitor resources with process explorer, TechPowerup GPU-Z.

Also I purchased Process Lasso to manage background processes to give priority to my P3D and XP.

Load times after a cold reboot do take a long time unfortunately, I don't think there is any way around this except not add the addon's. I find if I shut down P3Dv4 and due some tinkering and fire up P3DV4 again (warm reboot) that my load time is considerably shorter.

My current sim is 445 GB not including the FreeMeshX which is another 60 GB. According to my properties I have 600,000 files in 6140 folders, so that is no slouch. 

I find that I have to back the sliders off a touch in large urban areas like London and Heathrow. But rural areas I have the far right.

 

The key is to be sure of what files are being installed where, and if an addon is acting up you can revert to the last known situation where the sim was purring along. I believe that there are plenty of addons that might cause havoc. For me installing JustFlight non compatible aircraft and porting over REX before they were fully compatible were the culprits.

Bryan

[1st fltsimguy 466]

By the way, I don't know about the monitor issue and moving windows. I don't have any issues like that. I have both monitors with the same refresh rates, both hooked up to HDMI ports on the PC, everything is fine on that end for me.

Bryan

[curt1 79]

Don't think uninstall.  P3Dv4 as built-in options to help correct your issue.  Ignore the title of the link, there's some very helpful stuff that may correct your situation. 

[Lon Duncombe 83]

I had that 2nd monitor fps problem.  There's a thread somewhere that states this occurs if you have fps limited in the Nvidia control panel.  I removed the limit and have set my fps on p3d to unlimited. I've never had a problem with fps since.

 

Lon Duncombe  

[n99wb 10]

the computer starting giving off continual beeps and I could hardly use the mouse as it was stuttering and jerking all over the place.<===

 

I'd like to hear more about that.

[aeronauta 66]

n99wb that has happened in some PC's due to some USB problem , only way is a PC restart.. many instances of this problem in the web..

Jorge

[AnkH 2,233]

One thing: if you uninstall P3D, all your P3D stuff that ended up in your C: drive under AppData/Roaming and ProgramData/Lockheed Martin will remain. If your issue is within any file stored on the C: drive, a re-installation most probably does not cure things but makes it worse.

My advice: as the last time I had an issue with P3D not starting properly but running in the background instead, it was related to a corrupt dll.xml or exe.xml file. As those .xml files are rather tricky now that they depend on proper modification using the UTF-8 (or whatever) coding, some addons can corrupt those files not using the proper coding. In my case, the installation of RAAS coming along with the Aerosoft CRJ corrupted the dll.xml file...

Further: I know it makes the re-installation process even more cumbersome, but the best way to do this is stepwise. Means: after the re-installation of each addon, you have to check if your sim still works. I did this and only due to this cumbersome approach, I was able to pinpoint my issue to the RAAS installation. If you re-install Prepar3d, then without checking if at least the default sim works as it should, you install your 150+ addons at once, you can be 100% sure that you will not find the addon causing the issue...

[willy647 193]

the computer starting giving off continual beeps and I could hardly use the mouse as it was stuttering and jerking all over the place.<===

A CPU overheaded would start beeping. And it will throttle down to protect itself, thus causing the stuttering en jerkins. Are you sure CPU cooling is werking ok ?

[Rocky_53 1,566]

Thanks everyone for your advice. I'd like to apologise if my original post seemed like whining, but I have become extremely frustrated after spending all Sunday looking for a cure. Avsim is a great place and I really appreciate the help shown.

9 hours ago, 1st fltsimguy said:

HI Howard. You system specs are only slightly better than mine. You may be pushing the sim beyond its capabilities with all that stuff but not sure.

Most distressing. I had to do a reinstall as well, due to a stuttering mess.  I failed to follow my tried and true guidelines. Only install one item at a time, test it out be sure that it works as expected before moving onto the next addon.

I have tons of addons as well but not as many as you. And it does take a long time to install items when you have a plethora of them. My best advice is what I posted above, install only one at a time, ensure its working as expected and not negatively impacting the sim.

First up, does a vanilla install of P3DV4 work perfectly no stutters or bad behaviours, because it should be flawless.

I would say this Howard, I also actually install my addons into a dummy folder, I then copy the items to their required locations, then I test out the addon thoroughly and the sim thoroughly before moving to a new item.

My first experience everything was working flawlessly, I got careless, installed a dozen planes at once some not fully compatible yet, this was a big mistake my sim started behaving badly, forcing in the end a reinstall from scratch.

I am now slowly and steadily adding sceneries and planes and ensuring the sim works perfectly before attempting a new addon. I monitor resources with process explorer, TechPowerup GPU-Z.

Also I purchased Process Lasso to manage background processes to give priority to my P3D and XP.

Load times after a cold reboot do take a long time unfortunately, I don't think there is any way around this except not add the addon's. I find if I shut down P3Dv4 and due some tinkering and fire up P3DV4 again (warm reboot) that my load time is considerably shorter.

My current sim is 445 GB not including the FreeMeshX which is another 60 GB. According to my properties I have 600,000 files in 6140 folders, so that is no slouch. 

I find that I have to back the sliders off a touch in large urban areas like London and Heathrow. But rural areas I have the far right.

 

The key is to be sure of what files are being installed where, and if an addon is acting up you can revert to the last known situation where the sim was purring along. I believe that there are plenty of addons that might cause havoc. For me installing JustFlight non compatible aircraft and porting over REX before they were fully compatible were the culprits.

Bryan

Thanks Bryan, advice appreciated.

8 hours ago, curt1 said:

Don't think uninstall.  P3Dv4 as built-in options to help correct your issue.  Ignore the title of the link, there's some very helpful stuff that may correct your situation. 

Thanks for the link Curt, it looks like this may be the way forward.

6 hours ago, Lon Duncombe said:

I had that 2nd monitor fps problem.  There's a thread somewhere that states this occurs if you have fps limited in the Nvidia control panel.  I removed the limit and have set my fps on p3d to unlimited. I've never had a problem with fps since.

 

Lon Duncombe  

Hi Lon, frames are set to unlimited with no interference from NI.

5 hours ago, n99wb said:

the computer starting giving off continual beeps and I could hardly use the mouse as it was stuttering and jerking all over the place.<===

 

I'd like to hear more about that.

 

3 hours ago, aeronauta said:

n99wb that has happened in some PC's due to some USB problem , only way is a PC restart.. many instances of this problem in the web..

Jorge

 

1 hour ago, AnkH said:

One thing: if you uninstall P3D, all your P3D stuff that ended up in your C: drive under AppData/Roaming and ProgramData/Lockheed Martin will remain. If your issue is within any file stored on the C: drive, a re-installation most probably does not cure things but makes it worse.

My advice: as the last time I had an issue with P3D not starting properly but running in the background instead, it was related to a corrupt dll.xml or exe.xml file. As those .xml files are rather tricky now that they depend on proper modification using the UTF-8 (or whatever) coding, some addons can corrupt those files not using the proper coding. In my case, the installation of RAAS coming along with the Aerosoft CRJ corrupted the dll.xml file...

Further: I know it makes the re-installation process even more cumbersome, but the best way to do this is stepwise. Means: after the re-installation of each addon, you have to check if your sim still works. I did this and only due to this cumbersome approach, I was able to pinpoint my issue to the RAAS installation. If you re-install Prepar3d, then without checking if at least the default sim works as it should, you install your 150+ addons at once, you can be 100% sure that you will not find the addon causing the issue...

 

1 hour ago, willy647 said:

the computer starting giving off continual beeps and I could hardly use the mouse as it was stuttering and jerking all over the place.<===

A CPU overheaded would start beeping. And it will throttle down to protect itself, thus causing the stuttering en jerkins. Are you sure CPU cooling is werking ok ?

Thanks guys. Yes Willy, the first thing I did was to default the BIOS, so no overclock. The issue appears immediately on P3D startup, once I eventually get out of the initial startup screen, things are OK. I have also tried starting the sim with no USB connections except the keyboard and mouse, but no improvement.

[Nyxx 6,993]

150 addons. wow

Are they all made with v4 installers? My v4 main folder is 133 GB and without side instalers total around 160GB

Are all you airports active as well?

 

[Rocky_53 1,566]

7 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

150 addons. wow

Are they all made with v4 installers? My v4 main folder is 133 GB and without side instalers total around 160GB 

 

Actually Dave, that's incorrect, I was thinking of my original FSX setup. It's more like 100, but all V4 installers. Mostly Orbx as you can imagine.