The Law of Unintended Consequences

[allardjd 1,853]

I learned something new last night. I was trying to help a flight sim club friend whose FS9 had stopped working completely. Repeated attempts to start the sim would bring up the splash screen and within about five seconds an error box would report that FS had a problem and could not start.

We were pretty much resigned to a re-install of FS, but decided to do an on-line search first. We found little of help, but one forum entry somewhere made a reference to the default flight being unable to load possibly being a cause for that kind of error message on startup. Following up on that, we opened FS9.cfg and put a semicolon in front of the line "SITUATION=...". Amazingly, that did the trick.

In reconstructing what had happened, he'd done a system restore a few days earlier, attempting to resolve a non-FS problem. That rollback had removed the installation of a payware AC in FS9 and that AC was in the saved default flight. I don't know why FS couldn't recover from that and just roll over to a default AC, but obviously it could not.

We had a happy ending; FS did not require re-installation and we learned something new in the process.

John

[mutley 4,487]

Thanks for the heads up John, hopefully useful if someone else gets the same problem after a system restore.

[rob16584 42]

That happened to me loooong ago and after a fair bit of net trawling found the same solution

[aeromax 10]

Very good information. Many thanks to you, for this comprehensive solution.