hi all,you've probably heard that running real-time virus scan causes stutters. it does. so you right-click that icon at bottom right, select "exit" and try again--still stutterswell, you have only turned off the graphical user interface. your anti-virus program keeps scanning in the backgroundopen the GUI, go to the settings section, disable all automatic scans of everything, disable auto-loading at windows startup, rebootor kill the corresponding services in the task manager, if you know what you're doing (caution, some scanners run four or five services and they're named nothing like "virus scan")hope this helps someone

VilkI recently installed the new McAfee security center that is provided free by MSN. It was suggested in another thread that I run services.msc and turn off the McAfee stuff there in services. I can turn off everything except the McAfee Real Time Scanner that I think is causing my micro-stutters in FS9. I get error 5: Access is denied .Could it be that since MSN is providing the McAfee stuff free to their internet subscribers that they don't allow me to turn it off for my flight sim sessions?thanks

sorry, i have no formal knowledge in this particular areahaving said that... oh boy, i spent a couple of hours last week trying to remove mcaffee from a friend's factory dell. i was eventually able to cripple it enough for the program not to bug him any more, but it wasn't a clean jobtry autoruns to disable at startup what you don't need

I think on-access behavior varies from one AV software to another. Avast!, for example, allows you to define folders which are never scanned - adding FSX's installation folder here is a breeze. Not that it seems to do much good, as by default Avast! only appears to scan a couple of files from the FSX folder when you start the game up (the EXE at least), but none while it's active.Still, it's good advice. As I noted, not all AV software are alike and I'm sure there are plenty that do interfere with FSX.

You can also try freeware like the ominous-named but very user friendly EndItAll, or the ever-popular FSAutoStart. Both programs will help you "kill" processes you don't want running without actually destroying your system. The changes you make can be as temporary and reversable as you want them to be. I don't know how well these "killer aps" will work in Vista, though.Jeff ShylukAvsim Product Reviewer

not every fps killer (or "stutterer") runs in its own process