About Crash to Desktop (CTD) issues

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Issues that crash the simulator are the worst possible kind for the customer AND the developer/publisher. For the customer it means he paid for something that does not work on his system, for the developer they are hard because most of the time there simply is no way to find out what causes it. But let me first make some general comments.

• The software is not faulty. If it would be the error would happen on all system and these forums would look rather different.
  
• I believe we have around 15 to 20 customers where the error is directly related to loading the Airbus X Extended on THEIR systems. There is an incompatibility between their system and our software that is not present on over ten thousand other systems.
  
• We have some other reports where the customer has had a CTD but it is not repeatable. As we all know FSX is not the most stable software product ever created. Even a clean FSX on a clean Windows 7 can crash. In fact we have a few ways to force it down.
  
• As every other add-on developer we can only guarantee the software to run on a FSX installation that it as MS intended it. It you have tweaked settings, changed standard files the changes of something going wrong increase dramatically. In fact 20% of customer support we have done in 2012 ended with a reset of the FSX.cfg and that solved the problem.
  
• We have never seen any CTD on any of the testmachines we use. These machines run diverse/language versions of Windows and FSX/P3D.
  
  I believe the points above are all rather standard. But it does not help the customer that faces a FS that does not run the Airbus X Extended. As I said there is very little we can do to assist them. An issue we cannot recreate is almost invisible to sort out. So we often have to revert to giving advise. This advise is by definition rather standard because as as said we most likely have no idea what causes the issue.
  

  • Try moving your FSX.cfg to other location on your disk. FSX will create a new one on start up.
    
  • If you changed any DLL try the original
    
  • Check is simconnect is installed and running
    
  • Run FSX with admin rights (certainly if it is installed in it's default location)
    
  • Do a scandisk check on your disk to see if any files are corrupt (if you are not using a SSD a defrag can sometimes fix problems, do not ask why)
    
  • If you see an error check Google to see if it is not an error that is common for Windows and it only triggered by FSX. Certainly issues with "Msvcr80.dll" and "side by side errors" are common and are caused by problems of Windows. That they are trigger by this addon and not by others is not unlogical as all add-ons use different modules of Windows.
    
  • Update your drivers and Direct X
    
  • Check if Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package and Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package are installed and not corrupted and/or changed.
    

  If FSX crashes tell is what you were doing and what message was given. Also give us some information on your hardware.

  In the end as I said these are the worst kind of problems and honestly they are often not resolved. A clean install of FSX will fix 99% of them of course (assuming Windows is okay) but we understand that is the worst advise you can get. But sometimes it is all we can do.