Well, well, well. I have just reinstalled Windows ME, and all of the other bits and pieces that are required (drivers, WinZip.....blah blah blah). Anyway, after this was done.........I attempted to reinstall FU3. Yes, I said attempted. Amazingly (anf for the first time ever using Windows ME), the install procedure FAILED. This happened during the San Francisco scenery installation, and involved the screen going blank, and the entire PC becoming unresponsive. I had no other option but to reset. This obviously resulted in an unfinished FU3 install procedure, and therefore exactly the same problems that I had with Windows XP (no way of uninstalling the software, and no way of reinstalling it either).Now, this is VERY significant. Like I said, this has NEVER happened to me with Windows ME before, and that is very strange. One piece of hardware that I am now considering is the CD-RW drive. I installed this myself, although this was after I had installed Windows XP. However, I cannot remember if I had installed FU3 before I installed the drive.This is starting to get very tiresome, and I really wish now that I had never messed around with what was a perfectly operational system. A hard lesson learned indeed.I may well have to remove the CD-RW drive and see if that makes a difference, but to be honest my heart is now firmly set on a completely new PC. I have had just about enough of all this messing around. I just want a working PC !This is Chris Low....dejected and thoroughly ######........over and out.

Chris,Just for future reference you might like to consider having a relatively small C: partition. I have mine set at 2GB, and the rest of my 40GB drive is partitioned into 7 other drive letters, each dedicated to it's own set of applications. One partition (drive letter) is dedicated to FU3 UK on my system, another for X-Plane etc etc.This way, you can have any OS you like, muck about with anything on the C: drive, without affecting sims such as X-Plane and FU3 on the other partitions. For example I could format my C: partition and install Windows XP (perish the thought!) and it would have absolutely no impact on my sims at all.You might also like to consider using some proprietary disk image software, such as Norton Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image (my choice) so that you can image your C: partition to another spare data partition so that if ever any major (or minor) screw up were to occur, you can be back where you started with a clean installed OS in about half an hour. Much better than the system restore points that XP has in my opinion, and it's tried and tested software too, been around for over ten years...Chris E, ENGLANDhttp://www.circle-software.co.ukAvoid AGP texturing = Better Performance ;)

Chris, I hope its not the FU3 install disk itself getting a bit old?

Chris,"This obviously resulted in an unfinished FU3 install procedure, and therefore exactly the same problems that I had with Windows XP (no way of uninstalling the software, and no way of reinstalling it either)."Sorry for your problem about PC... But for the "reinstall" problem, I had before a problem during install of FU3 with reboot and of course no way to reinstall via the panel... But if you reinstall it via the setup.exe program Exemple F:setup.exe it works fine... For me it was ok.Hope this help.Regards.Richard.

Chris,You mentioned somewhere that your sound card was flaky? I have had an issue with this before as FU3 accesses the sound card all through the installation. My rec. is REMOVE it! Pull the card, kill the drivers (ME should do this itself), reboot and retry.My early Celeron PC had an on-board sound card that hung the install. I pulled the jumper to disable it and voila! I later installed my old Sound Blaster AWE card and it worked fine. BTW, 'standard' Windows drivers make my AWE flaky too - I HAVE to use the SB drivers or I get midi problems and (sometimes) loud bursts of noise instead of Windows sounds :-eekAnother thing! I have had a couple of crashed installs that wouldn't proceed. I had to remove the registry entries as FU3 thought it was already installed. Rather than reformat the HD :-( , just fire up 'regedit.exe', search for 'Looking Glass Studios' and 'Flight Unlimited' and delete those keys. Then the install will run again.Maybe now you understand my cynicism relating to XP? XP is the first (well, second but they didn't enable much in W2K) step in Microsoft, Intel and the US Government gaining complete control over your computer use. Sure, XP runs great on Intel Pentium 4 PCs, with all the latest XP software but it compares DISMALLY to 98SE on a lesser PC as it's too top-heavy. Certainly my office P3 667MHz runs at about half-speed :-grrJon Point*************************([email protected])*************************

Jon,Do you have EXACT instructions to follow with respect to the Registry modifications ? I don't really want to make a bad situation even worse.To be honest, I don't really know what to do at the moment. I was intending to remove the CD-RW drive, but I am pretty sure that I tried installing FU3 before I installed this drive......and this resulted in my first unexpected shutdown."If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Yeah, right. :-)Chris Low,ENGLAND.

Robert,The shutdowns have occurred SIX times so far (three times with the FU3 Install CD, twice with the FU3 Scenery CD#1, and once with the San Francisco Scenery CD#2). The chances of three separate CD's all starting to fail at the same time are virtually zero.Chris Low,ENGLAND.

I have made my decision. I am going to "get under the hood", check the connection of the SoundBlaster Live card, REMOVE the CD-RW drive, re-connect the Zip drive, format the hard disk.....and then reinstall Windows XP. I need to know if the CD-RW drive is contributing to the problem, or if the sound card is to blame. Even if it isn't, I am not particularly happy with using burned CD's as backups. I have already found one or two errors on both backup CD's, and that just isn't good enough.1x750Mb external zip drive + three 750Mb zip disks is looking like a nice package at the moment...... :-)Chris Low,ENGLAND.

Slightly beside the point but still, whenever you get FU3 properly set up again you'll never have to install it again. Just make sure you put it on a partition other than C. Then you may mess with operating systems as much as you like and your full FU3 is still residing, intact and fully functional, where you put it. You may even copy it to another location, use this "version" for tweaking and playing and keep the old one as a backup. I've still got the original FU3 installation as a backup on drive D. It's been there since I used Win98 and has been copied over to drive E. My drive E installation is the one that I use, tweak and modify. Then there's my UK South installation, based on a hi-res, no OT installation. This is the only one that the registry knows about.So, if you manage to get FU3 installed, through WinME or XP, you may always change to another OS later. As long as you don't format the disk where FU3 resides, that is.Hans Petter

Hans,I would prefer to know that my system is stable enough so that I could reinstall ANYTHING without problems, should the need arise. However, with respect to my recent problems.....see my latest thread.Chris Low,ENGLAND.