FS Crash to desktop

[American398]

i got this strange problem going on, for some reason once in a while, not everytime i load FS, but once i get my flight set up and hit the "fly now" button, everything loads up then all of a sudden it will crash to the desktop, it even happened when i refreshed an aircraft after i had been editing some stuff in the aircraft cfg file. This just recently started happening and i dont know what the heck it is.

[pfflyers]

From reading posts here and my own experiance I'd say the most common causes of that are usually related to incompatable gauges or scenery. Of course those are not the only reasons, but you might try to think of things you recently added or changed.

I once made a cfs2 airplane into an AI plane and although it worked fine as a flyable plane every time it flew into my vicinity as an AI my sim crashed. So I guess sometimes it can take a little detective work to find the cause.

[LouP]

Make a copy and then delete your FS9.cfg file. Start FS9 and let it build a new one then try it out for a while. If doesn't crash after that, you can pretty much bet it was a bad line in the FS9.cfg. I had to kill the sim while ago with the old ctrl-alt-del because of a lock-up and after that FS9 kept quitting. I followed the above steps and all has been well now for a while so I am guessing the crash did something to the FS9.cfg file.

Good luck, I'm sure you will figure it out. Just don't look to MS for help cuz their standard line is you got too much stuff in there. The last time I checked my set-up was around 80 gig small and it works fine.

LouP

[American398]

Make a copy and then delete your FS9.cfg file. Start FS9 and let it build a new one then try it out for a while. If doesn't crash after that, you can pretty much bet it was a bad line in the FS9.cfg. I had to kill the sim while ago with the old ctrl-alt-del because of a lock-up and after that FS9 kept quitting. I followed the above steps and all has been well now for a while so I am guessing the crash did something to the FS9.cfg file.

Good luck, I'm sure you will figure it out. Just don't look to MS for help cuz their standard line is you got too much stuff in there. The last time I checked my set-up was around 80 gig small and it works fine.

LouP


ok thanks Lou, ill give that a try and let you guys know how it goes, thanks

[Lionheart]

My FS9 has started locking up and crashing to desktop stating that I have run out of virtual memory. Also, Gmax has started crashing on me and at times it crashes a dozen times a day now where it used to crash perhaps once in a week. I have also had crashes with FSX, but lately I havent.


I think its a ms update....


I have 50 Gigs of memory free on the main HD and I have defragged 4 times in a week and a half. Go figure.



Bill

[Brian_Gladden]

I haven't been able to run FS9 since my virus infection over a month ago. I think I finally have the infection cleaned out but I'm afraid I will have to do a completely new install of FS.... Or go over to the dark side and try FSX...

Brian

[Cazzie]

I haven't been able to run FS9 since my virus infection over a month ago. I think I finally have the infection cleaned out but I'm afraid I will have to do a completely new install of FS.... Or go over to the dark side and try FSX...

Brian

Hey Brian, do both! :d

Sometimes it's good to do a fresh install. Tap wood, I haven't had to do anything with this new rig. But I did so four or five times on the old one. The main problem (other than time involved), is getting the :censored: Flight1 packages reinstalled!

Make sure you dump anything related to FS9 in the Application Data and Registry before a reinstall.

Caz

[expat]

I was cursed for over a year with CTD's almost every flight longer than 30 min and almost within minutes near a certain part of Florida. Pretty sure it was a missing or corrupt main texture file. To find it though would have been a needle in a haystack. Reinstalls didn't work for some reason. HDD failure and replacement finally resovled it. Wish you luck - it is demoralsing knowing "it's going to CTD, but not knowing when". Let us know how things progress.

[LouP]

Hey expat,

First disable all of your add-on scenery and try out FS in problem area. Then add-back half of it and try it out. Keep adding back half of what's left and trying until you get the crash and then you will have narrowed down a group of potential problems. This is how I narrow down my problem areas when I get them other wise you are right in that you would take a very long time testing one area at a time.

LouP :ernae:

[American398]

hmm well i did delete the fs9.cfg and thought it was working but i got another crash, for some reason the game started to act funny after i installed active sky, cause when i uninstalled AS there was no sun in the sky lol, the light was there but there was no sun, so i have to say after AS things started to run a little funny

UPDATE: ok guys well i may have solved in(but im not sure lol) i thought it might have been the nvidia drivers that i had so i decided to roll back the drivers and then went back into FS and just gave the sim a hole bunch of commands on the select aircraft screen, cause thats where it would seem to crash, when i would select an aircraft, so i gave it a hole bunch on commands by pressing a, b, c,.....ect and pushing enter eventually to see how it would handle it, and i did that a couple of times and it seemed ok, so im hoping that it was a driver issue and the roll back did the trick. so ill be back for another update if this proves to work or if the crashing keeps occuring.

[American398]

nope i guess that didn't work, i got another crash

[Lionheart]

My issue with FS9 crashing ended up being a malfunction in my Aerosoft German Scenery 4. I had reloaded it 4 times, and found it was loaded as a stack, total of 5 times. My computer was gaining 1,000 megs of memory every full second in FS9, which by the time 10 min's rolled around, it was at about 1.5 million megs of memory useage. No wonder it was crashing.

Disabling the scenery (unticking the checks) stopped the memory draw. No Germany, but no crashes.

Hope you get it fixed.



Bill

[American398]

well i tried unticking all the scenery but it still crashed, i got no clue what it is.

[pfflyers]

I just had something funny thing happen to me: I was flying from Ellsworth to Minot and right at the halfway point the screen went black and I got the dreaded "Flight Sim has encountered a problem..." message. So when the sim reloaded I tried the same flight in a different airplane, same thing, sim crashed in the same spot. Next I tried the flight in reverse, Minot to Ellsworth no problems, made it all the way, landed, refueled and flew back to Minot over the original route, no problems this time. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

[deathfromafar]

Today I uninstalled FS9 because of the rampant CTD's going on. I had way too much mess in that folder which alot of it went unused. I ended up making over 50gb free after this even with transfering over files! I copied the stuff I wanted to save and moved it before the uninstall. I will do a clean install and replace only the items I want/need to keep section by section. I have a pretty well stocked FSX in their already but I have too much in FS9 that I use to discard it for some time to come.

[pfflyers]

Everytime I open my FS9 root folder there's more folders and files in there than last time! I don't even know where a lot of it came from or if I really need it.

[American398]

Today I uninstalled FS9 because of the rampant CTD's going on. I had way too much mess in that folder which alot of it went unused. I ended up making over 50gb free after this even with transfering over files! I copied the stuff I wanted to save and moved it before the uninstall. I will do a clean install and replace only the items I want/need to keep section by section. I have a pretty well stocked FSX in their already but I have too much in FS9 that I use to discard it for some time to come.

well thats actaully what im trying right now, ill let you guys know how this works.

[Lionheart]

well i tried unticking all the scenery but it still crashed, i got no clue what it is.


Sorry, I meant that I turned off the Germany Scenery only, which had reloaded 5 times, so it was listed as a diff scenery (somehow) five times. That was the issue I had going.


Also, if you have dual AFCAD files with the same names, you will get a CTD automatically if you boot up at that location or fly over/near it.



Bill

[American398]

Also, if you have dual AFCAD files with the same names, you will get a CTD automatically if you boot up at that location or fly over/near it.



Bill

well i reinstalled the game and still got a crash, im now out of solutions, but i did not put any AFCADS in after the reinstall so i know that cant be it.

[LouP]

Have you tried different drivers for your video card to see if that changes anything? Also, would you be happening to be overclocking your vid card? It could be heating up once you start to push it.

:tgun2::tgun2::tgun2::sniper::sniper:

LouP

[American398]

Have you tried different drivers for your video card to see if that changes anything? Also, would you be happening to be overclocking your vid card? It could be heating up once you start to push it.

:tgun2::tgun2::tgun2::sniper::sniper:

LouP

yes i did try some different drivers and it happened on both. but i uninstalled SB3 again and loaded up FS multiple times and it was fine, i went to different airports with multiple planes and everything was fine. so lets see how many times i can load FS and SB with out a crash.

UPDATE: ok well i successfully loaded FS with SB a bunch of times with no crash. so hopefully thats the end of it if i dont jinx it by posting this messege. but ill be back if anything happens. but i appreciate everyones help so far.

[Lionheart]

American 398,

Try opening up your Windows Task Manager (Control / Alt / Delete). Click on Performance. If you have vista (cough cough) click on the Resource meter. Then look at FS9 running in the window and see how much memory its running. If you see small 'jumps' in memory, like about a meg or so every second to 10 seconds, then you have something that they call a 'memory leak' that is bring up the RAM in your sim incrementally and gradually and constantly. Until you find the issue, then you will continue to have crashes.

But............! If that isnt whats going on (memory hikes) then belay that. :d


Bill

[deathfromafar]

Slightly off path here as to my situation, I did my reinstall for FS9 and started stacking everything up and all was going well. But when I started reintroducing the gauges and modules all hell broke loose. So, uninstalled again and will rebuild from the ground up more or less. I was able to save a few things so I don't spend 2 months building everything from scratch but is okay. Am going to keep this install streamlined as much as possible since the same HD is shared with a FSX growing. I drew a list of aircraft that I know I want on hand as well as addon scenery. Should be nice and smooth and highly functional when I get done.

[Lionheart]

Slightly off path here as to my situation, I did my reinstall for FS9 and started stacking everything up and all was going well. But when I started reintroducing the gauges and modules all hell broke loose. So, uninstalled again and will rebuild from the ground up more or less. I was able to save a few things so I don't spend 2 months building everything from scratch but is okay. Am going to keep this install streamlined as much as possible since the same HD is shared with a FSX growing. I drew a list of aircraft that I know I want on hand as well as addon scenery. Should be nice and smooth and highly functional when I get done.


Dang... So reinstalling doesnt always help.

DeathFromAfar,

You might check out a seperate additional HD for scenery and certain addons. They say that running scenery from another HD helps the sim to run faster. I cant figure that out, but evidently it does. There are some good external HD's now out there that look pretty cool and are up to 1,000 terrabytes. You can thus load up backups of your FS on there also as well as system backups, and its portable.


As for checking things out. If you 'have a feeling' of a addon (or several addons), you should be able to easily check them out and diagnose the system.
* For scenery, simply 'un-check' the red tick on a scenery installation to deactivate it. (Its still in there, but turned off). Then reboot FS and check frame rates, watch the Resource Meter to check its memory useage.

* For Modules, try dragging one out onto Desktop, Boot up FS and check frames. Repeat until you have gone through them all to see if one of those could be the culprit.

* With gauges, again you 'should' be able to check these by going through and taking the latest ones installed, and dragging them out to Desktop and running FS. However, with gauges, if they are not being 'called up', then they arent functioning/running. Thus they would have to be 'online' (being used by a plane(s) in order to be causing a drainage of resources or crashing.
One such gauge is the sound type gauges, DXD files I believe they are called. they will cause this and many planes can use them, so if you have a certain file out of whack that they all share (I am not familiar with the net of files and module(s) it uses), then that too will crash your system.

When you are a designer and gauge maker, you run into this every so often (too much, lol) and learn to diagnose the issues. Sometimes, inventions in the FS world to enable alot of cool things to be done, can cause issues in a sim. So elaborate addons that use modules, that have a part of their 'net' of bits accidentally deleted could render your sim unfunctional. Reloading your various programs and addons from their 'main' installers can fix such issues.



Also, as was mentioned by someone earlier, you can 'rename' your FS installation and redo the FS installation and then drag and drop your past installations into the new sim, then delete what you want too from the previous install once your new installation is complete and all running fine. (I usually keep a bare bones backup for emergency purposes to use files from so I dont have to use the CD's).



Bill

[LouP]

Also, something Bill said made me think that you should check the size of your page (swap) file to make sure its large enough. I remember reading somewhere that at a time it was thought that if you made it almost zero that FS would run better, theory being that there was less reliance on your hard disk for memory. I don't think that this train of thought ever worked out well. :banghead:

LouP :jump:

[deathfromafar]

Roger that guys, good advice. An update, got everything back in place overall. Am going to slowing add aircraft and scenery as I go. This time I am not going to bloat up the program too much as I did these last two years and avoid beta type items that I know caused problems last time. I also got talked into using Ibnet for multi sessions but it ended up causing havoc in the end no matter how it was installed and set up. Anyhow, short of it is now I have FS9 running nice clean & fast. It looks better than ever and couple with my recent FSX Acceleration ventures I am happy with both.

[American398]

ok guys its been a while now since ive posted, and im still getting crashes, ive tried deleting the whole fs folder and reinstalling, deleting the fs9.cfg file, reg cleaners, virus scans and i cant seem to figure it out. i know it cant be the scenery, aircraft, or gauges because ive had the same stuff since before it was crashing. these crashes could happen at any time it seems now. 3 times i tried to do a flight from LAS - SFO on vatsim over squawk box and 3 times i got a crash. the first i got up to about 2000ft and crashed. the second i got a little further but not much, and the third i did not even push back and it crashed. im out of solutions. do you guys think a reinstall of windows XP would do anything?

[deathfromafar]

After all my uninstall and reinstalls, everything is working perfectly and smooth with zero CTD's or error messages. A clean install will do the trick 99% of the time. It did for me. Sim loads up in less then 1 minute, planes and scenery call up in a flash. Big difference now is that I have less crap in the sim than before, a lot of gauges and modules that were plugging up things. Now it is like having a brand new sim!

[deathfromafar]

ok guys its been a while now since ive posted, and im still getting crashes, ive tried deleting the whole fs folder and reinstalling, deleting the fs9.cfg file, reg cleaners, virus scans and i cant seem to figure it out. i know it cant be the scenery, aircraft, or gauges because ive had the same stuff since before it was crashing. these crashes could happen at any time it seems now. 3 times i tried to do a flight from LAS - SFO on vatsim over squawk box and 3 times i got a crash. the first i got up to about 2000ft and crashed. the second i got a little further but not much, and the third i did not even push back and it crashed. im out of solutions. do you guys think a reinstall of windows XP would do anything?

There's got to be something you're missing. that is staying to cause havoc after reinstall or maybe as noted before, you have a scenery conflict and or driver issue. I have seen this before and normally there are more than a few ways to skin the animal on this to get you up and running again. I will let others say what they can to help and I will foreward your issues to a couple of guys I know who are tech savy on FS.

[Motormouse]

I just started getting a ctd in fs9 after a windows security update,
a little bit of detective work and it seems as if gauges that are used more than once in sim are at fault, in my case it was aircraft using the f4f4wildcat.gau, so I've now put a copy of the particular gauge in each panel folder of the aircraft that uses it.

ttfn

Pete

[American398]

well i dont know guys, im still getting these crashes, ive tried deleting the entire FS9 folder twice now and it has not worked. It cant be a gauge or scenery because ive had all that stuff when it was running fine.