A possible solution if your sim hangs on exit

I'd posted about this awhile ago trying to figure out how to stop my sim from hanging every time I quit. It was hanging because it was stuck in an endless loop trying to decompress the Reno Air Race package. Even though I deleted everything related to Reno from my content manager, it still wanted to decompress that package, and would either freeze when I quit the sim, or it would close the sim visually but keep it running in the background until I killed it in the task manager. I know I'm not alone because there are lots of posts on the official forums/Reddit/etc about the same problem, and a lot of the "solutions" blame hardware - bad SSD sectors, faulty ram, etc. I was worried I'd have to replace some hardware until I found a reference on Zendesk to the package hanging problem.

When you delete stuff from the content manager, you're not actually deleting it. The files are still there and if it was hanging before, when MSFS sees the partially-completed package it will try to restart it even though you've removed it from the sim.

The solution is to go into the official directory (open your community folder, go one directory up from that, and go into Official) and delete the offending file. There may be multiple copies of the file including various patches and any of them will trigger the loop again, so it's best to search for a keyword in the file name ("airrace" in my case) and delete everything you find.  When I did this, the sim finally started behaving normally again.   Might not be a universal fix, but if it works for you, great!

Edited March 3, 20233 yr by eslader