Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler - Looks like I won't be flying for a while

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | PC Support | Looks like I won't be flying for a while

DVA9513
Captain, B757-200
OLP

Joined on February 16 2011
50 State Club
Century Club
Everett Century Club
DVA Five-Year Anniversary

Sugar Land, TX USA

145 legs, 288.9 hours
39 legs, 69.5 hours online
135 legs, 271.4 hours ACARS
18 legs, 31.1 hours event

Posted onPost created on August 18 2015 17:05 ET by Michael Lacaze

Guys I have been working on my setup for a while as some recent event caused both installations on both drives on my PC to crash to the point that I can't even get a flight started anymore.

I have one drive that houses my original FSX setup which had always worked flawlessly and another that I used to set up FSX-SE for testing purposes without disturbing my original install.

About one month ago after trying to install PMDG on the FSX-SE drive I started getting crashes to DT after loading a flight. Once the flight was loaded if I switch views from Virtual to 2D more than once FSX would freeze on the 100% loading prompt and would never respond after that. I worked on that for a week or so scrubbing every site that I know of to fix it but most just go back to the UIAutomation DLL which is not the issue on my system. I tried going back to an earlier version that was backed up an still no luck. The only thing that I can think is that FSX-SE had an update right about the time this started but I cannot figure out how to remove that and stop further updates to see if that would fix it.

Then last weekend as I was trying to narrow down the issue I noticed that if I would move a panel to my 2nd monitor it would also trigger a crash. Once again I scrubbed the sites and could not find a solution. I am starting to wonder if my video card is bad but that's the last step in trying to fix this.

So, after that I figured that I could just go back to my original install on the other drive but lo and behold that one is also crashing now. Same problem with the 100% loading crash. I am baffled at this point and really don't know where to go from here.

Michael Lacaze

Captain, B757-200

DVA12568
Assistant Chief Pilot, CRJ-200

Joined on March 20 2015
50 State Club
Everett 250 Club
Seven Century Club
Eurocap Club
Online Seven Century Club
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary

Atlanta, GA

769 legs, 1,968.6 hours
704 legs, 1,838.9 hours online
695 legs, 1,825.3 hours ACARS
19 legs, 89.1 hours event

Posted onPost created on August 18 2015 19:32 ET by Christian Samuels

Will Miss you in the skys, Wish you luck my friend

Christian Samuels (DVA12568)

Posted onPost created on August 19 2015 17:29 ET by Michael Lacaze

I probably should have listed my hardware and what I've done so far. Hopefully someone will have an idea of what is wrong short of reinstalling everything.

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64 bit
Intel I7-2700K
16 GB ram
Nvidia Geforce GTX580 3 GB mem
Hard Drive 1 - Seagate 750XL hybrid drive - >175 GB free - Original FSX Install
Hard Drive 2 - Samsung EVO 850 SSD - >100 GB free - FSX-SE

Checked UIautomationcore.dll OK
Checked all video card voltages and load - controller load <25% Mem use <75%
All Simconnect versions loaded
Tried disabling trim on SSD - No change
Reloaded SSD from previous version - helps but eventually returns to the problem with crashing
Set FSX.exe to run as admin - No change
Set FSX to use win XP compatibility - this was worse and had to remove this setting
Matrox Triplehead2 go monitor 1 3840x1024 on GTX580 port o - tried to update matrox to no avail
2nd monitor on port 1
tried new nvidia drivers to no avail
No indication of any mem errors on system or GPU

Here is the dump summary
Dump Summary
------------
Dump File: fsx_62613_crash_2015_8_16T0_4_0C0.mdmp : K:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\FSX\fsx_62613_crash_2015_8_16T0_4_0C0.mdmp
Last Write Time: 8/15/2015 7:04:00 PM
Process Name: fsx.exe : C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX\fsx.exe
Process Architecture: x86
Exception Code: 0xC0000005
Exception Information: The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.
Heap Information: Not Present

I also noticed that 2 uiautomationcores are running but suspect that the 7.0.0.0 is being invoked by another program or serivce. I also tried the older dll previous to 6.0.6001 to no avail.

uiautomationcore.dll C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX\uiautomationcore.dll 6.0.6001.18000
uiautomationcore.dll C:\Windows\SysWOW64\uiautomationcore.dll 7.0.0.0

Michael Lacaze

Captain, B757-200

AFV744
Senior Captain, B747-400
OLP

Joined on April 27 2012
Diplomatic Mission
Globetrotter Extraordinaire
50 State Club
The Penguins Of Madagascar
Online Five Hundred Club
Event Century Club
Double Millenium Club
Historic Quadricentenary Club
Five Million Mile Club

Wellington, NS Canada

2,468 legs, 10,374.5 hours
752 legs, 1,426.3 hours online
2,468 legs, 10,374.5 hours ACARS
238 legs, 466.0 hours event
3,528 legs, 15,773.5 hours total

Posted onPost created on August 19 2015 18:00 ET by Bill Gardiner

Michael, are you getting any fsx error messages at all? Can you click "more info" or does it crash right to the desktop before any of that. There might also be something informative in the windows event log.

I have Opus weather and for a while I was getting crashes because of a bad .wx file. Try starting with the default cessna and no weather and see if you can get further with that than you have been.

I'm also wondering about the 2 uiautomationcore.dll's that are running. Maybe that is normal but worth a check.

Bill Gardiner

Senior Captain, B747-400

DVA11021
Captain, B757-200
OLP

Joined on September 13 2012
B757 100 Club
Everett 250 Club
Triple Century Club
Online Triple Century Club
DVA Five-Year Anniversary

Milford, NH

375 legs, 620.5 hours
365 legs, 604.5 hours online
374 legs, 618.9 hours ACARS
21 legs, 51.4 hours event

Posted onPost created on August 19 2015 20:37 ET by Sean Zarella

make sure you have the correct uiautomationcore.dll there is a fake one causing problems .

Sean Zarella (DVA11021)

Posted onPost created on August 20 2015 11:24 ET by Michael Lacaze

Yes, I should have mentioned that I did check the windows event logs and there is nothing in apps, security, or system that captures the event. Basically it just stops responding and the only log is in the FSX folder. I still have the correct uiautomationcore dll in my FSX folder on the other drive and did try that one to no avail but never tried to stop the 7.0.0.0 version. I'll see if I can kill that one before running FSX-SE. That may help.

Thanks guys. This is really baffling as all this started at once without me adding or changing anything and I am pretty sure that I do not have a virus since these are all separate bootable drives. I also run several supporting programs such as REX, FDC Live Cockpit, Flight Sim Commander, and FSInn but all of those except REX run on a separate computer via WideClient. When I have the problem WideClient is not even connected yet.

Michael Lacaze

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on August 28 2015 11:32 ET by Michael Lacaze

I did not make any progress on my existing OS so I decided to try an upgrade to Windows 10. The upgrade went fine but still I had issues with FSX crashing when I tried to move any panels to my second monitor. I also tried another video card and no luck. I took the plunge and did a Windows 10 clean install and reinstalled FSX-SE and after some fine tuning I can run full screen across my first 3 monitors and panels on the second one with no issues.
My next step is to get all my ancillary programs installed one by one to get them all running again.
What I did notice is that FSX runs very smoothly on Win10 but turning on anti-aliasing is important as you will have a range of display issues if you don't. Also I am no longer using Nvidia Inspector. I now wonder if these 2 things caused the other issues. Unfortunately I am too far into the clean install to go back. I'll keep you all posted.

Michael Lacaze

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on September 05 2015 19:53 ET by Michael Lacaze

I now have all my ancillary programs working as before and can still run FSX-SE with absolutely no issues. I did an offline flight Thursday night and had no issues from beginning to end. Here is what I have tested and working so far...

REX Essential Plus with Overdrive - New Steam version
REX Soft Clouds
FSUIPC latest version
WideFS
DVA ACARS
FSX Panel - Self developed .NET program that allows me to emulate the AP, Overhead, and Radio functions via a standalone touch screen display connected to FSX over WideClient
Flight Sim Commander
FSInn - Tested all comm functions and they are working as designed.
FDC Live Cockpit

All of these apps installed with no issues on the first try except for FSInn. For that I had to change some settings as the server side was interfering with the client side voice radio communications. Also, I was going to do an online flight last night but when I tried to shut down my Win7 OS to boot up to Win10 the PC just froze. Turned out that Outlook was locked to the PST file and would not let the OS shut down. After about 3 hours of troubleshooting I found that the hard drive that housed the PST file was failing and would not allow file operations to continue thus locking up Outlook. Luckily I had an old spare drive. I changed it out, restored the files and after that all was well. I'll be glad once I have everything back to normal.

My next steps are to...
Install the DVA aircraft for the 737 and CRJ and test
Install QW757 and test
Install PMDG 747X and test

Michael Lacaze

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on September 11 2015 17:24 ET by Michael Lacaze

In my quest to get back to a reliable system I took a step forward and a couple of steps back. Up to the point where I needed to install my 3rd party aircraft I had no problems. So I installed the DVA 737-800 and started having issues again.

Wehn I loaded the 737-800 FSX crashed to desktop as soon as the VC was displayed. After several attempts to load it I checked the Windows appliction log and found that the MSVCR80.dll was the culprit. After checking several posts on the internet this is related to the C++ redistributables and it appears that if you start installing old versions to try to work around this there is a good chance that you'll corrupt your system. So, I will not use these for now unless I can find a proven fix.

I then went on to install the latest version of QW757 and the install went fine. In my initial testing all appeared to be well but I tried to do an online flight last weekend and once I loaded a flight plan into the FMC the routes were there but no names displayed on the legs page and a lot of information was missing on several other pages. Again I started an Internet search and found that QW uses fonts from Win 7 that are not in Win 10. I still had my Win 7 files so I copied the fonts from the font folder to the Win 10 fonts folder and only added the ones that were unique. Once I did that the FMC issue was corrected. I am going to try another onine flight this weekend and if I have no issues I'll move on to installing PMDG 747X.

One last thing... Steam just updated FSX once again to version 62615 from 62613 and there may be some issues with that but so far none of the add-ons that I am running are listed as having issues with this release. Because of this I also had to update FSUIPC to version 4.944 as recommended by Steam support. This may cause some new unexpected issues as well

Line up and wait...

Michael Lacaze

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on September 25 2015 16:34 ET by Michael Lacaze

The saga continues... I finally completed a successful online flight with the QW757 with no issues. Unfortunately not long after that when I rebooted the PC to try to load my drive that housed Microsoft FSX I was greeted with CHKDISK which stated that it found errors on the system. Before I could halt the scan CHKDISK started deleting indexes and then proceeded to wipe data from every drive in the system and eventually marked every drive as dirty. It ran for at least 30 minutes before I decided to just shut the PC down.

When I restarted it I had no boot files on any of the drives and my PC was effectively wiped of 3 OS's and much of the files on a total of 5 drives. I was totally baffled and really didn't know where to start to try to figure out what was up. I went to the Internet and found some info on how to get the dirty bit cleared from the drives but that entailed a full format for each one. Before I attempted that I tried using the install disks to get the boot tracks restored to no avail.

So, off to formatting I go...

Once they were all formatted and I confirmed that the dirty bit was cleared with fsutil, I restored all the files and OS's with backups with the exception of the old Win7 OS for MS FSX and then proceeded to test the Win10 Steam FSX (SSD) and my Win7 non games disk (Hybrid Drive). As of day before yesterday all was well.

Last night I took the PC out of sleep from the Win10 OS and notice that it had done some updates and needed to restart so I clicked the restart button and walked away. When I returned a few minutes later the dreaded CHKDISK was prompting me again but this time I stopped it. Then I got the BIOS no boot files message and new that I was in trouble again. This time it wiped out my Win7 disk to where the BIOS could not even see it and marked the Win10 disk as dirty again. So now I am thinking $$$ as I had no idea what could be causing all of these problems.

This morning I browsed the Internet for a couple of hours and think that I may have found the issue.

Win10 has a feature called Fast Startup that upon shutdown effectively puts the OS into a hibernate state instead of doing a full shutdown and releasing all resources and unlocking all drives. If while the OS is in this state you try to boot another OS of a different version when it starts it sees that something has the drives in use and thinks that there is a problem wtih corruption which starts CHKDISK. CHKDISK then starts deleting indexes and files to try to isolate the sectors that are being used for the Win 10 OS and also marks the drives as dirty.

If you allow Win10 to do a dual boot with the legacy OS this problem can be virtually eliminated but in my case I still had one more OS on my PC for the MS FSX version. When I tried to start that one it saw the same issue and corrupted all the drives. When I rebuilt the OS's after the first problem I decided to not use dual boot so when I shut down the Win10 OS and started the Win7 OS lo and behold the corruption was back. The problem is that I had the Win7 OS as the 1st boot choice in the BIOS so when it restarted it tried to load the Win7 OS rather than just going back to load the Win10 one. If that had happened I would have been OK.

So anyone who might be using dual boot with Win10 and a legacy OS needs to be aware of this and always disable Fast Startup on any Win10 install that is coexsiting with a legacy OS. I hope that Microsoft is listening.

And now I am off to rebuilding my OS's again...

Michael Lacaze

Captain, B757-200

DVA10705
First Officer, B747-400
OLP

Joined on April 27 2012
Two Million Mile Club
Everett 500 Club
Millennium Club
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary

Kamloops, BC Canada

1,060 legs, 5,399.0 hours
87 legs, 356.0 hours online
1,059 legs, 5,397.6 hours ACARS
15 legs, 48.6 hours event
3,528 legs, 15,773.5 hours total
15 legs dispatched, 24.4 hours

Posted onPost created on September 25 2015 17:37 ET by Bill Gardiner

ouch, it is sounding like a saga. Good luck with it.

Bill Gardiner

First Officer, B747-400

Posted onPost created on October 09 2015 17:23 ET by Michael Lacaze

It's looking better now. I could never get 2 OS's of different versions to run without the corruption that I discussed in my earlier post. So I had to put all my apps on one Win10 OS to work around this. After rebuilding the OS again and removing the drive with the 2nd OS, Win10 is no longer corrupting the other drives.

I was also able to get PMDG 747X installed and tested and all appears to be fine. I am now back up totally but may need to do some fine tuning to get everything working well. I'll let you all know if I run into any issues. The good news is that Win10 will work with FSX-SE and at least in my case all of my 3rd party aircraft other than the Delta fleet. All of my supporting apps, and remote PC work fine as well. Never use 2 different OS's on a Win10 machine.

Michael Lacaze

Captain, B757-200

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