Right. I've got bald patches from tear at my hair, my neighbours think there's a domestic disturbance going on, and my knuckles have no skin from punching the wall. I have honestly never had so many problems trying to play a game before. Emulating DOS games on Windows 7 is easier than getting FSX to work properly.

I'll start at the beginning - FSX Gold arrived in the post today (that's Flight Simulator X and the Acceleration expansion). Being a Windows games, and only a few years old, I expected it to run just fine on Windows 7 64 bit.

How wrong I was.

The install went smoothly. I installed both the original game and the expansion. Whacked all the graphics settings up to max and booted up a custom flight from Dublin airport. The game looked great, and was running at a decent framerate. I was happy. I spent about an hour taking off from a bunch of different airports in a bunch of different planes. I then exited to desktop, and played something else for a while. Another hour later, I tried to boot up FSX again. It told me it had encountered a fatal error and had to close. I tried about 20 more times, all with the same result. A quick look on Google told me it was a common problem, and I tried some of the fixes I found.

A repair install of both the original game and expansion didn't work.
Neither did downloading some .dll file and putting it in the FSX folder.
Neither did deleting the FSX.cfg file and letting the game create a new one.

I decided to uninstall the expansion, and lo and behold that seemed to work. Until about five minutes into a flight, when I got dumped back to desktop with a message saying I had run out of memory. I lowered the graphics settings. Same result. I lowered them some more. Same result. Google informed me that this was also a common problem, but I couldn't find any apparent fix.

So. I really want to be able to play this game. Has anyone on the forums successfully managed to circumvent all of these problems and get it to run on Windows 7 64 bit? If so, HOW?

Have you tried a complete uninstall/reinstall, and possibly updating your video drivers?

I did this last night, to no avail. But updating C++ runtime seemed to do the trick - I did this, then did a complete reinstall and it seems to be working fine. Well, except for occasionally switching from my GPU to integrated graphics for no apparent reason and giving me blurry textures, but it's easy to remedy this.

Well, now that I've got it sorted, I'll ask for this thread to be locked.