piffle

I finally got it to run.  I found an old DX9 from some Sim City files (thanks anyway pmanhart).  Once that worked it gave me some other error that I had to repair so I just uninstalled reinstalled.  Now it is working fine.  Will post my thoughts to other boards as appropriate.  However, running Win 8.1 64 bit it runs pretty well, the very first time it loaded it took forever for the aircraft to be visible (I have GTX 560 i7 oc'd at 4.4ghz).  It was sort of quirky, but since then it's been fine.  Takes about a minute to load a new city or change time from night to day, but once it loads it runs really really well.  Definitely want to turn up your scenery density, I noticed Qwest field was missing from Seattle, meaning that density was too low on default.  Lastly, the joystick worked fine.  I had to re-confingure it so that it picked up the throttle axis, but other than that it really is the same commands as FSX.  Like I said I'll post more on the other forums tomorrow when I spend more time.  Man am I glad I decided to take a staycation for all of TG week :-).