FSUIPC.ini goes Kaploof!

[quarterback85]

When sitting at the Free Flight menu screen of FSX, I experienced a hard lock up. Soon, my entire machine was "thrashing" to the point that the only way I could recover was to do a power off/power on reset. The cause of this could be whatever, and I'm not too concerned about this (because FSX does that sometimes).

However. When I rebooted and restarted with an FSX flight, the first thing I noticed is that none of my throttles were working: The cause was that the FSUIPC.ini had completely rebuilt itself. All of my assignments were lost. Fortunately, I had an older backup, so I'm okay now. Obviously I'm concerned that other files throughout my FSX installation might have been trashed or corrupted as well, although everything seems to be working okay now.

My question is this: Short of generalized data corruption, is there any circumstance that would cause the .ini file to completely rebuild itself?

[Pete Dowson]

When sitting at the Free Flight menu screen of FSX, I experienced a hard lock up. Soon, my entire machine was "thrashing" to the point that the only way I could recover was to do a power off/power on reset. The cause of this could be whatever, and I'm not too concerned about this (because FSX does that sometimes).

However. When I rebooted and restarted with an FSX flight, the first thing I noticed is that none of my throttles were working: The cause was that the FSUIPC.ini had completely rebuilt itself. All of my assignments were lost. Fortunately, I had an older backup, so I'm okay now. Obviously I'm concerned that other files throughout my FSX installation might have been trashed or corrupted as well, although everything seems to be working okay now.

My question is this: Short of generalized data corruption, is there any circumstance that would cause the .ini file to completely rebuild itself?

Only the original one being destroyed or rendered unreadable I should think. These types of INI and CFG files are actually maintained by Windows via a "Private Profile" interface -- there are no direct file accesses to them in FSUIPC's own code. Maybe Windows was in the process of updating it on FSUIPC's behalf when you had the crash -- if the "Free Flight" menu you mention is from the initial selection screen just after loading FSX then FSUIPC does write a couple of parameters back to the INI when it is reading all of the existing ones, keeping track of things.

It's always a good idea to make backups of any of your data files especially after making serious changes. Not only the FSUIPC4.INI but of course also your FSX.CFG and SCENERY.CFG files. I make a very regular habit of such backups!

Regards

Pete