Need assistance, my Aircraft disappear

[Mr.Mugel]

Hey guys,

I have a problem with FSX Acceleration, on Vista 32, running DX10 mode. I first noticed it when I wanted to fly an airplane, but couldn´t find it in the selection menu. Ok, flew some other plane and didn´t think further about it. But over the days many more aircraft disappeared from the menu. So I checked out the simobjects folder and they were all there.
Next thought was that I might have screwed something up while installing repaints for example. Checked the aircraft.cfg and it was empty. The is still something there, I can mark lines and all, but there is no text. The files still have a size on disk (For example Dino´s Tomcat has an aircraft.cfg of 38.2KB, but it is empty)

Till now the only thing that seems affected by empty .cfg files is FSX. Didn´t have any other problems, which I think could be related.

The bad is that I lost some aircraft I won´t easily get back. Tweaked files and such. My brother who is working with computers and knows quite a lot looked into it, had the files on his PC, but it was still the same, filesize yes, but no text inside.

Maybe anybody had this problem too, or knows a solution or at least a reason? Would be great!

[huub vink]

Lennart,

From experience I know the "User account management system" from Vista can cause odd problems. You could try to switch this off and see whether this solves the problem.

Cheers,
Huub

[Mr.Mugel]

I think I turned it off in the registry, looked it up, and the changes required are still there. I´ll see if I can find out if it still has any input on this system. Thanks!

[Daube]

Dissappearing aircrafts ? Empty cfg files that are not really empty ?
Hmmm.... time for a deep hardrive error checking. (Checkdisk)

[Mr.Mugel]

Have it checked, took 4 hours for a 500GB HDD, 75GB free space. Said it was OK.

Files still empty.

[huub vink]

As the files are still there I don not immediately expect a bad disk. It looks like either a program which "re-writes" or "encrypts" config files. In my opinion the most likely programs to do so are either security programs or viruses.

I assume you have already thoroughly checked whether you computer is absolutely virus free, which leaves the security programs.

I don't know which security programs you are running, but perhaps try to run some alternative programs and see whether the problem persists.

Success,
Huub

[Mr.Mugel]

That´s the one thing I could imagine, right now I got an actual version of Norton 360 running, it scans when the PC has free resources, not totally lucky with that one, as it is not really clear where it actually gets into action removing files and such, maybe I should uninstall it, and try something else, Norton is included with our provider, but got some free trials from Cebit last year.

[huub vink]

There are currently quite a few good freeware anti virus programs. You could try Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG or Avast for instance. In some cases this might require some additional anti spyware programs.

Good luck!, As it sounds you as you will need it!

Huub

[Mr.Mugel]

Thanks! I´ll see what comes up!