leostr

Jerry, Are you running the simconnect diagnostic output? Could be helpful. Take a look at the SDK documentation if you don't have it set up yet. That helped me figure out my problems weren't with the pmdg modules, but simconnect. That said, given that you've got problems with other s/w, the problem may well be more OS - I'm happily running FSX and FS9 in Vista64 now, and can promise you that once its up and running, its rock solid. I'd leave the SxS folder well alone though, tempting though it may be to delete the simconnects in there, I believe that it just creates more problems than it (apparently) solves. As Pete says, you can't change things in the folder without changing the permissions in a very roundabout sort of way - credit where its due to MS - they've made it so very difficult for the end user to break ! There's an interesting (well to me) blog over at MSDN that gives you a bit more of an insight into what SxS does - http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/1pace.aspx; anyhow, I think I am running OT here.. I agree, UAC (though vastly improved in Win7 over Vista) is a royal pain. Its the first thing I do when installing W7/Vista - switch off UAC completely. If you know what you're doing, it shouldn't be too much of a risk (in the ten years I've been maintaining PC's on my network, only once have I ever had a compromised machine, and that was the handiwork of another user..). See what happens if you temporarily switch it off while you (re)install FSX - I would also suggest right click the setup and Run as Administrator..

Hi Jerry, I too had innumerable problems getting Simconnect SP2 and Vista x64 to work together. The problem initially cropped up with a problem loading PMDG's MD11 - FSUIPC was the only addon that didn't have an issue, that would load and display its menu every time. I tried reinstalling Windows & FSX, all to no avail, every time, it seemed, Simconnect would not work (I checked the Event log, and that was full of simconnect.dll not found in the WinSxS folder, despite it being there). I think there is a lot of discussion about whether or not you should even play around with the content of WinSxS - one of the posts at FSInsider suggested that they should not be touched, as it would bork any future reinstall or even clean install. Anyhow, I finally figured out what the issue was stopping Simconnect.dll. It turns out (and it seemed to be specific to SP2/Acceleration version) that having my \Documents folder anywhere other than the default, C:\users\%username%\Documents would stop it from working - I'd previously kept Documents on a separate partition, pointing the documents folder to that, and for some reason, simconnect doesn't like looking elsewhere other than the default. Paul Gollnick over at PMDG did say he'd let someone over at ACES know, but I guess with recent news, that bug (if indeed it is a bug), is unlikely to see much happen. Don't know if that's anything related to your problem, but it may help. Leo