Here's to my first ever post on the Avsim forums. I've been a simmer since 2011 and have referred myself here many, MANY times for assistance, but have never needed to post anything till now - that means it's a real head-scratcher.... Here's to my next issue to deal with on my list!

About a month ago, FS Spotlights began to crash my copy of FSX Acceleration suddenly on startup. No changes were made prior to the error. Initially I just uninstalled the program and all worked fine. I could work without it. Now I'm dealing with an airplane that simply will not take my edited lightmaps for some reason, so to avoid using the awful default night cockpit flood lighting, I would like to get FS SPL working again. After two days of fighting with the program, I have narrowed the issue down to the FSLSpotlights_FSX.dll.

My problem began with the FS Spotlights "has not initialized correctly" message. Reinstalling was the suggested course of action, and that did not work (I made doubly sure to delete EVERY FSL related folder regarding Spotlights). I added full permissions on every FSL folder on my system, that did not work. I edited out the DLL entry in my DLL.XML file in .../Roaming/Microsoft/FSX/dll.xml, which apparently bypasses the Spotlights error, and finally my sim starts up. 

Once I've begun a flight, I open the manager, and there's no light options in the groups window pane. Not surprising if the dll entry has been edited out. But I can't get FSX to run any other way as long as FS SPL is installed. 
 

I've been pulling my hair out troubleshooting this for two days now and have combed every forum for an answer. I've gotten nowhere. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you!

 

My specs:

Intel i7-4700MQ 

FSX Acceleration

NVIDIA GTX 745M

FS Spotlights v. 1.0.0.38

I did have SweetFX but have since deleted that program and its associated files in an effort to troubleshoot - to no avail either.

d3d9.fx is the only .fx file in my FSX root directory. 

Let me know if you guys need anything else. Thanks again for any assistance you can give!

Do you have FSX installed in the default location under Program Files?  If so, Windows may be preventing FSSpotlights from writing its shader files out.  You might try reinstalling Spotlights as administrator, but better still would be to move FSX to a folder whose name does not begin with "Program Files" to avoid potential Windows UAC interference.

Are you running DX10 preview?

Did you try clearing the shader cache?  If not, I'd recommend doing that, as a corrupt shader could be an issue...FSX will rebuild it for you.