I have a gauge that uses gdiplus.dll and for some reason, FS refuses to load the gauge, and will simply "disable it" for that session.I've installed Arne Bartels "test.gau" (which is a gdiplus test gauge), and it loads and displays just fine!Clearly, there's no issue with the XP gdiplus.dll so I'm at a loss to understand what's going on here... Any ideas?

A selfcompiled gauge or a third party one? For a third-arty one I could only guess that it might load the gdiplus.dll explicetely with LoadLibrary and then needs a specific directory where the gdiplus.dll resides. Which one you can only guess, maybe the modules subfolder maybe the FS main directory. For my test gauge (if I recall that right) I don't load gdiplus.dll explicitely, but load it indirectly by calling functions out of it. One reason it's simpler to program and there is no dependcy on specific locations of the dll. Ok it depends strongly on the proper installation of the gdiplus.dll in the system, either installed already in the windows system folder (XP and similar which come with gdiplus.dll by default) or the FS main folder, because that's the place anyt file is searched without explicit path names.Arne Bartels

I suppose you could call it a "third-party" gauge, since it was developed by one of the ESDG team members for a project under development. I have tried placing a copy of the gdiplus.dll in the root folder of FS9, the modules folder, the C: root, et cetera... all to no avail.The sim simply reports that it is "Unable to load blah-blah and will disable it..."What IS confusing is that I've found 13 instances of "gdiplus.dll" on a still rather virgin WinXP installation, most of which have different file sizes! ???

Bill,at least with VS .NET you only need to do three things:1) add GDIPLUS.LIB to the linker input files2) using namespace Gdiplus;3) #include That's it. No need to open the DLL directly there.

The problem isn't with compiling the gauge; the problem is that FS9 won't load it (or, at least not on all three XP machines it's been tried on).Since I SAW the gauge functioning in FS9 on the programmer's computer, I KNOW that it works, but am at a loss as to why it won't load & run on any other machines...

If it works on the programmer's machine but not on others, it's most likely a missing file. Does this gauge use anything else in addition to GDIPlus? DirectX components for example?

You're most likely missing a system DLL, namely, one of the runtime libraries. FS will give you this error if it cannot load the library. MS stopped including standard compiler runtimes in service packs, so you must include them with your gauge starting with MSVC7.xLook for a program on the web called DEPENDENCY WALKER (freeware) that you can get here www.dependencywalker.com. This will let you look at your GAU file (or any other program for that matter) and give you a complete list of the DLLs it references. That will give you a complete list of what it needs to run, and you can cross-check to see that you have the right libraries installed on the PC.If you are indeed missing a file, make sure you distribute the runtime version, not the debug versions.Hope this helps.

Thanks![ ? ] MSVCR71.DLL Error opening file. The system cannot find the file specified (2).[D? ] EFSADU.DLL Error opening file. The system cannot find the file specified (2).So, I found at least TWO "required files" missing..Brilliant!

Most welcome :)