Thanks Ray,I'll give it serious consideration when I get back from holiday. Cheers,Stuart

Stuart,I was in the same boat as you when I had my 2.8GHz Athlon single core. With RTM textures were sharp and always in the highest LOD, but as soon as I applied SP1/SP2 I had a blurry mess. If I removed SP1/SP2 textures were back to normal. Same issue after mutliple OS/FSX reloads and months of tweaking. I've been tweaking hardware and software for benchmarks for ten years, so there was nothing wrong with my setups. The only way I was able to get acceptable texture loading with SP1/SP2 was to go dual core, and even then I was not happy until I went quad. I do beleive I have the photo patch on my system at home, as a user was able to send it to me back when I was in your situation. People around this forum have a hard time accepting that SP1/SP2 causes a serious blurry mess on some single core systems, though its a fact. Even if I turned all scenery completely off with the exception of what was needed to product 1m textures, it was still a blurry mess. Of course removing SP1 would instantly cure the problem. I'll let you know if I can find the photo patch.

I do have a copy of that particular patch on my systems and like you I experienced similar issues with blurries once SP1 was released and they weren't resolved with SP2 either...Unfortunately I am not sure I can pass along the file to you, but perhaps microsoft might consider hosting that file on their site as it is important to a handful of users...I did find however that Radeon updated their drivers and that seemed to fix the blurry issues I was experiencing post SP1...Having said that, I'm also at the point of not being able to support RTM in the stuff I've been doing and have had to bite the bullet and upgrade myself...

Hey Dean,I have not found an email address for you but I wanted suggest that you do a 5m mesh for the Pacific Northwest region that will be getting the Orbx FTX treatement. I bet it would be a big seller among FTX users, and I know the PNW region is highly anticipated.

There was a suggestion by a user, who suggested mixing data components of FSX SP1/SP2 with the FSX RTM binaries. This was humorously dubbed "the Fankensim" and Phil Taylor rightly pointed out that this would absolutely not be supported by Microsoft. Use a search on the forums to find the Frankensim.