If you have read any of my posts on the matter, you seen my system has not been afflicted with stuttering or blurries. Well that changed tonight. Now I'm not talking about the little micro stutters in banks as some have reported. I'm talking about the 1-2 second pause, then a sudden leap forward. It seems to happen at regular intervals like something polling. Well I tried everything I could think of short of a complete reinstall. No dice. I was just going to give up and reinstall FSX when I realized the last thing I did before this happened, was installing Webroot Spysweeper software, which of course is resident, so I shutdown the program. Still got the stutters. So I uninstalled Spysweeper and that did it, stutters are completely gone and FSX is back to normal! So if anyone who has these stutters also use Spysweeper, try to uninstall it and see if your stutters go away. Shutting it down is not enough. Looks like some kind of conflict going on between it and FSX!

Hi Tom,The problem may lie with 'SpySweeper.exe' which appears in the process list of Task Manager. This despite configuring SpySweeper (I have it too) not to load at Windows Startup. I tried disabling the Webroot Spy Sweeper Engine Service, but without this running in the background the SpySweeper GUI fails to start and you are invited to reinstall the program. You can, of course get around this by disabling it in an alternative (Simming and Gaming) hardware profile, as I have done, and select this at system startup. In my case the irony is I tend to do all my testing under my normal hardware profile which is stupid, I suppose. I rationalize this stupidity by assuming most average simmers are also likely to be using their default hardware profile, but this does not take into account the numerous other variables, like the presence of SpySweeper. Perhaps this would be a way of ensuring a common Windows setup, i.e. a level playing field for testing. I doubt it will happen :(MikeEdit: To anticipate your next question..LOL! Yes I have just tried running the sim under my 'Simming and Gaming' profile. I was full of high hopes and expectation but, sadly, saw very little improvement: the sim might be a little smoother, but the stutters are still present and, as seen under my normal hardware profile, the severity varies in intensity during turns. The sim is pretty smooth while following the a/c from behind or in cockpit, but the 'normal' intermittent microstuttering is still evident.

Another way to shut it down from running in the background is to go to the Conttol Panel/System/Hardware/Device Manager and select View Hidden Devices in the View menu then scroll down to non plug and play device drivers and scroll down the list of drivers - you should see three Spysweeper drivers - right click on each and select disable then reboot your machine. I will give this a go tonight to see if my copy of Spysweeper is causing the stutters.

I wonder if Windows Defender might cause similar problems on some systems.

I had troubles with Spysweeper too and got rid of it. I did a 2nd hardware profile, and despite a fine period of no troubles I did have a system freeze, necessitating a reset button press, and voila, Win2K would not boot. 5 hours later, all was well again. I did this once before, used multiple hardware profiles, and a very random and rare system freeze, and this ended up needing major repair using an ERD or reinstall. I now use AVG SpamFree or whatever it is. It's no charge and how no system impact as far as FS9's perf goes. I don't have the hardware yet to run FSX, IMO.Noel

Tried it with Spysweeper fully disabled in the Device Manager and I still get stutter although I think my stutter is firmly related to the use of the high resolution Horizon VFR UK scenery on my machine as I don't get stutter with the FSX scenery or any other VFR scenery.