FS2004 Stops Responding During Airport Loading

[Randy Tyndall 1087023]

Very odd situation today. After some kindly [Mod - Happy Thoughts]istance over at VATAME I finally got current charts for OTHH, Hamad Int'l in Qatar. Planned a Cairo (HECA) to OTHH flight. Already had OTHH freeware installed and checked out. Found GoCairo2010 freeware on AVSIM this morning and installed it.

 

Added the new HECA scenery and restarted FS2004 to let it update my scenery file. From the "Create a Flight" screen I selected HECA and then hit "Fly". FS2004 started to load the scenery, but when it started loading textures it froze at 6 percent. A quick look at Task Manager showed FS2004 Not Responding. Restarted FS2004 and tried again...same result. FS2004 starts fine, it was upon loading HECA that it froze, so I deleted the HECA freeware...same result. Tried Nairobi...same result. Tried OTHH...ran just fine. Tried FAOR...froze at 6% again. Tried Entebbe...same result. Tried a few airports in Madagascar...same result. Tried Tel Aviv...same result. Tried Gibraltar...ran just fine.

 

At this point I figured I had enough event logs stored up to sort out the source of the freeze. All of them listed FS9.exe as the faulting application and NTDLL.dll as the faulting module.

 

I restarted FS2004 and loaded up at Gibraltar, flew across the strait to GMNT and landed. Once on the ground at GMNT I parked and from the "MAP" tab selected "Go to Airport". Chose HECA and it loaded up fine. I started my flight, flew to OTHH and landed just fine.

 

After closing FS2004 I restarted it and tried to load at HECA again. No go. Restarted and loaded up at Tenerife, then flew to Accra no problem. Landed, and could go to any African airport I wanted from there using "Go to Airport", including any scenery and texture loads. If I ended my flight and then tried to reload to an African airport FS2004 froze at 6% on the texture load.

 

I am totally confused. It seems I can get in to Africa from somewhere else, but I cannot start in Africa. I looked at the scenery and texture files in FS9/Scenery/Africa and compared the installed ones to the ones on the Disk 4 AFRI.CAB cabinet file used during install. They are identical in size and file count.

 

Hit various airports every continent and [Mod - Happy Thoughts]orted Oceania ones, too. Africa and the western Middle East are the only places that seem affected.

 

Any ideas?

 

Randy

 

Edit: Changed the subject to better reflect what is going on

[Andrew McCabe]

Sounds like something corrupt in the scenery. You could try rebuilding your fs9.cfg file and see if that clears it.

 

To rebuild the Flight Simulator configuration file, follow these steps:

 

Click Start, click Run, type %appdata%\Microsoft\FS9 , and then click OK.

Rename the FS9.CFG file to FS9.BAK .

Start Flight Simulator 2004 - A Century of Flight.

Restarting Flight Simulator 2004 - A Century of Flight rebuilds the configuration file.

 

 

Good luck.

[Randy Tyndall 1087023]

Andrew,

 

Appreciate the help, but no joy. I renamed it to fs9.bak and then restarted fs9. it loaded up at the initial start screen and rebuilt the config with the aircraft set to be at Seattle, just like it should have. Went to the airport selection list and chose HECA. Froze at 6% like it has been doing.

 

Then on a whim I went in to FS9/Scenery/AFRI and deleted the scenery .dat file and restarted FS9. It went through the "generating new indexes" screen like it should have. Tried to load HECA again and zilch...stopped at 6% again during texture load. The event viewer never tells me what specific texture is stopping the load and causing FS9 to stop responding, just FS9.exe as the faulting application and NTDLL.dll as the faulting module.

 

One thing I noticed while looking at the scenery.cfg file. FS9/Scenery/Base and FS9/Scenery/World both say "Load Default=True". All the rest, including Africa, says "Load Default=False". I [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ume this is so when you actually load up at an airport it only loads the region's textures that you are loading up in to.

 

Randy