P3D re-installation protocol

[Benjamin J 751]

Dear all,

I did read all the help topics in the relevant forums for this, but didn't see that my questions were quite addressed. So, coming in here to pick your brains a little. I figured this is something many people have experience with!

Following some trouble with autogen and landclass, as well as a seeming inability to upgrade to 4.5 without making the sim crash upon showing the main UI upon startup, I'm tempted to just re-install P3D from scratch and start anew. However, while I know the basics of how this is done (uninstall the sim, then manually remove a couple of leftover folders in various locations), I was wondering if people can tell me what they typically do with their addons. Specifically:

- Do you have to  re-install all the aircraft addons that were not added by xml method? This is essentially all of the ones I own, except for the Aerosoft Airbus, which uses the xml method.

- I've gone through a real effort to bring all of my installed sceneries, also the ones that don't do that by default, to the xml method, and moving their directories out of the main Prepar3D folder. However, as you can imagine, many of them include effect and texture files that I may not necessarily have moved with the scenery's main folder. In some cases, where the names are descriptive (such as TropicalSim's or RFSceneryBuilding's), moving the Effects files after the fact was easy, but this is not true for all of them.

- Utilities such as Active Sky, REX addons, EnvTex, and the like. Do these need to be reinstalled, or, much like FTX Central, will they validate their installation upon startup to check everything is still in order?

- Orbx: I read somewhere that it is recommended by Orbx to move the Orbx folder out of the main sim directory, reinstall the sim, then move it back, and then start FTXCentral to verify the installation. Is that indeed correct?

- Finally, would you uninstall addons first, and only then removing the sim, or doens't the order matter? I was thinking that after the sim is removed, anything installed by addons should be easy to find and move to their respective folders. Is this an approach others have taken?

Some guidance on this would be appreciated!