First, this is a POSITIVE post, I am only going to relay what I did to finally get FSX / SP1 working as hoped, in the hopes it might help a few others.Initially, I was lazy and simply installed both patchs, for FSX and the SDK, and things went to #### immediatly. I got a 'Fatal Error' everytime I tried to load. Eventually I found out some old '.dll's' were the problem, so I deleted the fsx.cfg and renamed the dll.xml and that let me in. I still got an occasional memory dump and more 'Fatal Errors', but being the stubborn type, I continued on.I tried all the tweaks on Phils blog, some helped, some didnt. During this entire process I was being helped also by Mike at FS-GS and his daily response was, "do a re-install". After a 2 weeks of messing with it, I decided to finally take his advice, removed all addon programs, planes, scenery, etc. the SDK, and FSX, and re-installed FSX. It went BAD! For some reason, even though I had removed everything, the reinstall picked up most of my addon planes and some scenerys. I keep hearing thats impossible, but it happened. I uninstalled again, but before reinstalling, I did a 'search' for ANY FSX files on C drive, and it found some .msi's buried in the Windows folder. I deleted those also, and every other FSX file I could find. The second time Mike walked me through it, and of course it went perfectly, and FSX loaded only the defaults and I then installed SP1, and have not installed the SDK yet. I happened to be watching the screen as FSX was installing and noticed that it said it installed DX9c..WHOAAAAA ! I already had installed the April update for it, and if FSX overwrote it, that could account for a lot of problems, so I reinstalled the April 9c update as well.I am also using the new Nvidia drivers, 94.24, which now seem impossible to find, and I have to wonder why. However, at this point,I dumped all temps, ran Disk Cleanup, and defragged. This is ALL I have done, no 'tweaks', no modifications of any kind, all stock FSX. I went to my favorite 'test' airport, jumped in a default plane, and about fell out of my chair. I used to run at 25 FPS locked, and would get between 15-23 FPS depending on where I was flying. I immediatly noticed the FPS pegged at 25, so I ran it on umlimited just to see what it was maxing at.... and it was fluctuating between 45-90 !!! I locked the FPS at 30, and havent touched it since, and it pretty much stays there. I then installed Genesis mesh and LC and one addon plane, to see if that made a difference. The plane definatly dropped the FPS a few frames but it still stayed well above 23 most of the time. Right now, I am estatic with the performace and wanted to pass along how I got there, in hopes it might help a few others. Below are my settings and specs. The 2 major things seem to be removing those .msi files and reinstalling DX9c April updateAMD 64 FX-60 Dual 2.61 ghzNvidia 7900 GTX2 GIGS Kingston RAM10,000 Raid 0 driveOS XP SP2FSX Settings:Terrain and water:LOD radius: full RightMesh Complx: full rightMesh Res: 10 Texture Res: 1Water: low 2xScenery Complex: full rightAutogen: NormalSpecial effects: full rightWeather:Cloud draw distane: maxCloud coverage: MaxFrame rate: 30FSX controlled anti aliasing and anisotropic fliteringGlobal tex res: full rightLens flair and light bloom: offI hope this helps a few.

This just goes to show that if people were not obsessed about having every single slider to the full right they would actually enjoy this sim. Just imagine that they didn't put such a large range of settings, which is the case with most games. You can still get FSX to look a lot better than FS9 AND have good performance.Just wondering what is your airliner traffic setting?

to be honest, I seldom have AI planes on at all, as I now do 99.9% of my flying in multiplayer, and they dont show there.I have actually been wondering why they dont, as the road vehicles, boats etc do. Maybe in the future?

>>I am also using the new Nvidia drivers, 94.24, which now seem>impossible to find ...Just as an FYI in case anyone is looking for these drivers. I found that if you go to the NVIDIA site, click "Download Drivers", then click "NVIDIA Driver Download BETA" it will take you to a different search screen. This other search screen returned the 94.24 drivers when I searched for Product: "Geforce 7 Series" and OS: "Windows XP".The actual link is: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_94.24_2.html

Hi "PPSFA"...!Great news...but how did you specify your search for FsX files in your system ?Jesper.

I have to say SP1 is working like a charm!!I'm getting the well-deserved performance boost, and the promised slider nudge to the right, even with my moderate Pentium-D 805..I really want to thank everybody at ACES, you've done a great job.Keep it up & thanks again.

just selected Search in Windows Explorer, typed in FSX and had it search C drive