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I have read many forums over the years regarding FSX performance issues. We all want our flight sim to run as smoothly as possible with good frame rates. For me, a visit to Bojote Venetubo's web site and a couple of Nick N's tweaks pretty much sorts out most of my issues. Recently I had to install a new hard drive in my computer which resulted in a clean install of FSX together with my many add ons REX, VOXATC, GEX, UTX, PMDG etc etc. After endless nights of re-installing I reached the stage where it was time to add some liveries for my PMDG aircraft. I have the NGX 737 -600 to 900 plus the 777 and it's variants. Up to this stage I had tried a few test flights and was pleased with the performance of FSX. It seems that a clean install was worth the effort after all even though it had never been my intention. I love to fly scheduled flights in different parts of the world using the appropriate airline so a variety of liveries is important to me. I installed a few from PMDG through their Operations Centre but discovered that FSX Liveries had an excellent choice available. These are all .ptp files and will install through the Operations Centre. I must have downloaded close to a 100 liveries altogether spread across all the PMDG aircraft. After a couple of days of flying, I noticed that FSX would hesitate for maybe a second or so every now and again. It didn't matter if I was flying in a straight line, panning around, internal view or external view, it would just happen. My immediate suspect was REX which can cause me some hesitation when loading the weather, so I took that out of the equation, then removed VOXATC and other addons until I was pretty much back to basic FSX, but still the pauses continued. I even took a spin around Friday Harbour in the trike and the still the hesitation was there albeit slightly less. I thought over exactly what I'd done over the past days and decided that the problem had only started after installing the liveries. It was time to dig deeper, I thought I'd check out what was going on with each aircraft cfg. For those that don't know, the route to these files are:- FSX/SIM OBJECTS/AIRPLANES/PMDG e.g 737/aircraft.cfg. Now a typical aircraft.cfg file is normally 25 to 50kb in size, when I looked at the 737 files they were anything between 25000 to 30000kbs in size! up to a thousand times larger than they should have been! Now that's enough to slow anything down! A normal file is about 25 lines long and ends in the line visual_damage=0. After this line for every livery I had installed was written "For more PMDG liveries look at www.fsxliveries.com livery painted by Wizzardos (2013)" Now, I'm all for some advertising, but this phrase was literally repeated several thousand times, pages and pages of scrolling until I finally reached the livery below. It took me hours and hours of deleting, removing these surplus lines until each file was reduced to the size it should be. Once this was done FSX works perfectly, no more hesitation or stuttering. Now I don't know if multiple downloads caused this to happen, or whether FSXliveries adds these lines intentionally (I wasn't aware of such a problem when I'd been adding liveries piecemeal before) but I all do know is it solved my problem. Sorry FSXliveries, I love your products and have no complaint about the quality of the liveries. I would add that liveries provided by PMDG do not cause any problems. I did much research hoping to find an answer to my dilemma and found nothing remotely like what I've described above so I thought that it was only fair to share this in the forum in the hope that it will help some of you. Now I fully appreciate that most of you have the normal frame rate issues and are always looking for ways to improve performance, so this probably won't be of much use unless you are a livery hoarder like me! But even if you only have 10 liveries in your collection you might be surprised to find some monster files lurking in your aircraft.cfgs. Just reducing those could add a little bit more smoothness. I'd be interested to hear your feedback to know if this has been useful.