FSX freezes on Win7

[samainville]

I have installed FSX on Windows 7 64 bits, the games is all updated SP1/SP2, firewall off, no antivirus, run as admin, WinXP/SP3 compatibility. I use Saitek yoke and pedals, all this works fine on a separate drive with FS9 on Vista(dual boot). In Win7 I am in the process of mapping all my buttons and levers for the various paywares I have ie. Level D, FSD, Wilco, PMDG, Flight One etc. In checking the functionality of my buttons in FSUIPC button tab, the game just locks up after a while checking out the buttons. It might be clearer for looking at my log file(sent in a separate email). The joystick etc are completely disabled in the controls assignements of the game in an effort to avoid any kind of conflict using the FSUIPC facility. At this point I dont know where to look anymore for this problem.

[Pete Dowson]

I have installed FSX on Windows 7 64 bits, the games is all updated SP1/SP2, firewall off, no antivirus, run as admin, WinXP/SP3 compatibility

Why are you "running as admin" and why "winXP/SP3 compatibility"? You should just run FSX native, at normal privilege levls. Who told you to do otherwise?

In checking the functionality of my buttons in FSUIPC button tab, the game just locks up after a while checking out the buttons. It might be clearer for looking at my log file(sent in a separate email).

The log shows lots of repeated button activity, lasting 4 minutes -- did you forcibly terminate it then> What showed in the Joy/Button number displays top centre? Did you actually press any buttons? Does it "recover" if you pull the joysticks out?

I've actually never seen anything like that -- it seems to get signals from a number of joystick devices (#3, 4, 5, and 6). Are they all real? 4 devices connected? Loads of signals emanating from them!

Regards

Pete

[samainville]

Compatibility mode and admin seems to be the unwritten rule on all forums from what I gather, therefore you disagree with this practice?

I have in fact pressed many buttons, with the goal of verifying that all my controllers are working, I use these various modules from desktop aviator. To date they have worked very well in Vista for FS9. I use 2 seperate drives and boot to Vista when I want to play FS9 or boot Win 7 for FSX. Yes I had to force quit (end process in task manager)because it was frozen.

Let me give this another try and will see what happens.

Thanks

[Pete Dowson]

Compatibility mode and admin seems to be the unwritten rule on all forums from what I gather, therefore you disagree with this practice?

Well, yes. There's no need. FSX is perfectly happy as it is, as a normal Vista or Win7 application. And if you run FS at an elevated privilege then you have to run all programs which want to exchange data with it at the same level - else Vista and Win7 block the data sharing. There seems no point at all in making life so complicated.

I have in fact pressed many buttons, with the goal of verifying that all my controllers are working

So all the button changes listed in that log were real button presses you did at that time?

To date they have worked very well in Vista for FS9

Are you comparing FS9 in Vista with FSX in Win7? Why aren't you running FS9 in Win7?

There's no difference in FSUIPC's treatment of buttons in FS9 or FSX. What is more likely to be different is the joystick driver in Vista to Win7.

I use 2 seperate drives and boot to Vista when I want to play FS9 or boot Win 7 for FSX.

Strange. Why not just change to Win7 for both?

Yes I had to force quit (end process in task manager)because it was frozen.

So we don't know if it would have recovered if one or other of the 4 (?) devices were to be removed?

Regards

Pete

[samainville]

Strange. Why not just change to Win7 for both?

Eventually I will, I have a huge investment both time and money in FS9 on Vista and it works very well. I'm not sure if I will have to pay something to re-activate my Ariane 738, one of my favorites. Of course by moving over I would overcome the memory limitation of a 32 bit OS and that is attractive. In time I guess.

As I said I will report back after making these few changes in Win 7.

FSX is perfectly happy as it is, as a normal Vista or Win7 application

Would the same apply to FS9 for Vista or Win 7?

So we don't know if it would have recovered if one or other of the 4 (?) devices were to be removed?

Hum.......... never taught of trying that.......I imagine that would point to the culprit?

[Pete Dowson]

FSX is perfectly happy as it is, as a normal Vista or Win7 application

Would the same apply to FS9 for Vista or Win 7?

Yesbut with provisos.

The problems with any version of FS on Vista or Win7 really arise only if you let the FS installer do its job without selecting an install location of your own, outside of the "Program Files" folder. And the problems are not actually with FS but with add-ons which were not designed with Vista and Win7's oddities in mind. This is because the Program Files folders in both Vista and Win7 are protected against writing or change by any program which does not have "elevated administrator" privileges.

Even The programs themselves that are installed in Program Files cannot, without such privileges, write to their own folders! FSX knows this, it is "Vista aware" (and marked as such), and writes its data to ProgramData and AppData folders. This is the MS-preferred system, and newer add-ons written to MS-Vista standards would deal okay with this. But many like to write to folders inside the main FS folder, and therein lies most of the problems. The FSUIPC4 installer makes the FSX Modules folder read/write accessible to all, which is how FSUIPC4 is able to happily create its logs and INI files there. [installers -- anything with Install or Setup in the name --automatically get run with elevated admin privileges].

The situation is a lot worse with FS9 or before, because it is not Vista-aware, and does want to write to its own folders. To get over this, Vista/Win7 recognises it as a non-Vista program and when it is installed in Program Files it creates aliases for the FS folders. The makes things very confusing to the user. If you look at FS9's folders in Program Files with Explorer then you do not see the "real" ones, unless you run the Explorer "as administrator", which gives it elevated privileges. This is why I eventually gave up and wrote an installer for FSUIPC3 as well -- manually copying FSUIPC.DLL into FS9's Modules folder didn't get it into the real one unless done with elevated privileges.

The best and most efficient way around all of these potential problems is to always install FS in its own folder -- not accepting its installer's choices. I've always done this in any case. My FS9 is in a folder :\FS9 and my FSX in :\FSX. Then there's no fuss, no bother.

So we don't know if it would have recovered if one or other of the 4 (?) devices were to be removed?

Hum.......... never taught of trying that.......I imagine that would point to the culprit?

Yes, that's one possibility. But I'd still like to know if those button presses shown in the log were spurious (generated wrongly or automatically), or were actually your actions. If the latter, then it shows that FSUIPC4 was not "hung" but actively scanning your buttons and so should have been displaying them on the dialogue tab. In this case it may be something else preventing the dialogue from operating correctly, so the thing to do then is check the others -- do all the other dialogue tabs in FSUIPC4 operate okay, or not?

In FS9 there have been occasional conflicts with other add-in DLLs which somehow prevented the tabbed dialogues working. Something to do with mouse and keyboard interception, on the face of it. The usual culprit was "actigate.dll", though I could never reproduce any problems with it here, so it wasn't just that DLL alone but something also related to the environment. It was never resolved. Possibly you have something else installed which is having a similar effect. Maybe you could show me your DLL.XML and EXE.XML files just so I can check through the add-ins?

Regards

Pete

[samainville]

Well considering I'm not that far ahead with FSX and want to put all the chance on my side, I will follow your recommendation for choice of directory. So re-install here we come, might as well try FS9 again.

The button activations were intentional, I was testing that everything was working before starting to assign, when I noticed the freeze it is then I decided to investigate and avoid frustrations down the road.

Thanks

[samainville]

Well things are coming along, will give it a test tonight with my Level D and see what happens.