FSX-SE Menus & ATC suddenly blank - HELP

[Richard Myers_29817]

Does anyone know why my FSX-SE menus and ATC notifications are suddenly just showing single underline characters instead of text?  Tried re=loading, updating video drivers etc etc etc. 

 

Cannot fly certain operations without access to menus.

 

Help please

 

TIA

[Ian P]

Are you running DX10 preview mode? If so, try turning it off.

 

I've also heard of certain graphics card driver settings doing that - are you altering the graphics settings through your card driver? If so, try resetting to default.

 

Cheers,

 

Ian P.

[Richard Myers_29817]

Thanks Ian

I'm afraid I've tried disabling DX10 mode also graphics driver is set to default.  I've subsequently received a reply from DTG technical people who say that as far as they know the only way is to completely re-load windows 7. Not an option for me as I am away from base and do not have access to discs etc. 

I've run a system file check and it throws up an error on utilman.exe. Some sources say this can affect certain UI effects. I'm researching this further and will post here if a solution is found.

 

Regards Richard. (That's my grandfather in the picture BTW, but I am much older than he ever was!)

[Ian P]

Last time I looked in a mirror, it was a grumpy face, but neither yellow, nor with unattached hands and legs... Right amount of hair, though!

Anyway. Hmm. Those are the only two things I've ever heard of that have caused similar problems, personally, so I guess we're down to generic FS faultfinding time. When I got distorted text in my FSX installation, it was because of a change I had made in my nVidia driver settings.

Track down the fsx.cfg file (usually in C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX) and rename it to fsx.bak or fsx.old, fsx.dis. When you run FSX, it will create a new one. Don't make any changes (FSX will look awful. ;) ) but check whether that fixes the problem. If it doesn't, which I suspect it won't, then you can delete your new fsx.cfg and rename your old one back to fsx.cfg to get all your settings back. If it does fix the problem, which is unlikely, then you need to reapply all your settings to the new file... Sorry!

 

How much in terms of add-ons and tweaking have you done? Would it be a major problem to repair the installation through Steam? If not, then go to your Steam library page, right click FSX-SE in the listing, then "properties", "local files", "verify integrity of game cache..." - that will restore the original files and overwrite any possibly faulty ones.

 

Hope one of those helps!

 

Cheers,

 

Ian P.

[Richard Myers_29817]

Hmmm...tried all your suggestions last week but to no avail. I think you may be correct about video card settings. I installed the X-Plane demo and in an effort to improve performance I updated my video drivers (unfortunately I have Intel HD graphics on this machine, not the bst in the world) I believe the problem arose directly after I deleted X-Plane and also tried "rolling back" graphics drivers. Also tried 4 different drivers but no improvement. I am further convinced that it is the video driver causing the problem since my other laptop has an Nvidia 9300 graphics processor and works perfectly. What I'm not sure is whether ASUS have a tweaked version of the graphics driver since none of the four Intel drivers cure the problem. I'm looking for an ASUS specific graphics driver but so far no success.

 

Again thanks for replying, as a retired software developer of some 30 years experience I'm determined to crack this one somehow. Watch this space.

 

Regards Richard

[Richard Myers_29817]

Hi Ian:

 

FIXED !! After a week's worth of trying just about everything I finally tried the following...

 

ControlPanel/Troubleshooting/Display Aero Desktop Effects. Beleive it or not the troubleshooter found an error and fixed it automatically. I now have Menus with text and of course ATC text.

 

Don't even ask why this has fixed it, maybe try asking Microsoft (Joke)

 

Regards Richard M (BTW that really is me now!)

[Ian P]

Ah! That's a new one for me, thanks for letting us know.

 

When starting FSX, it usually sets Windows desktop back to "basic" mode, which disables Aero. I'm not sure why yours wouldn't be doing that, but as FSX has never been overly happy running alongside Aero desktops, that would make sense.

 

Glad it's working!

 

Cheers,

 

Ian P.
(Who's still a grumpy Smartie, sorry. ;))