Another piece of information: the hanging game can be caused by either the video hard or the hard disk sharing an IRQ with the sound card. Open device manager and from the menu "Resources by type", then check the IRQ. on my system, sound card is IRQ22, shared with both Intel SATA controllers It is apparently pushed to 22 because of the extra USB ports on the Asus motherboard. The soundcard should have its own Exclusive IRQ (21)

and a third post answering myself :-)Apparently a batch of Asus motherboards shipped with ACPI 2.0 under Power Options disabling ACPI on the chipset level completely when set to "Disabled". Can you check if ACPI 2.0 is disabled in your BIOS. It must be enabled for Vista to manage IRQ sharing correctly. I found it disabled in my BIOS.

Hi everyone,Might be a little bit too soon to say but it looks I might have finally got rid of the problem, however after all things I've been doing lately I can't really say what was the fix.To answer some of the last questions- I don't have any AFCADS installed (at least not to my knowledge)- I use Diskeeper 2008- Not sure how/where I check if I have ACHI disks...?- About CPU load on different cores I always have 100% on Core 0 and about 50% on core 1-3 when running FSX- When FSX has went "Not responding" the sound goes away as well, not looping in my case- ACPI 2.0 was disabled here too and I have now enabled it- Seems I have some IRQ sharing here as well, below is a pichttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/194824.jpgThe things I've done that I can think of right now since I started this thread is- went from a 4 GB page file on D: to also have a 2 GB page file on C:- upgraded my motherboard BIOS to the latest version- bought a Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series soundcard instead of using my Altec Lansing FX5051's built-in USB- I'm still using my SupremeFX II built-in audio for my headset- downloaded the latest version of IvAp and did a fresh install- launching IvAp External from Windows start menu instead of within FSX- disabled all visual special effects in Vista- ...and probably a couple of other things I don't remember now...Will report back here after doing some more flying to see if the problem really is gone, almost feels too good to be true if that is the case :-) Looking good so far anyway after doing a +4 hours flight today without any problems and with Ivap, ActiveSky X, FSRealTime and ServInfo running.

It seems that disabling ACPI 2.0 was the problem. That BIOS features, if disabled, also disables effective IRQ management. You should see an improvement in sound quality and frame rates. I can recreate it on my machine now. When I boot with ACPI 2.0 disabled, I have crackling windows and about 30% fewer frames. The hanging game is so rare though I haven't been able to verify that the problem is gone for good. Need more time to fly.