How is this possible!?

[Balsa_Pilot]

I installed new water textures in flight simulator 2004 the same way I always do, but when I start flight simulator and click fly now, I still have the same water as before! Absolutely nothing changed! Same goes for sky textures, clouds, sun...etc. I can open the texture and scenery folders in the main directory and see that the new textures have indeed overwritten the old ones, but there is no change to anything when I run flight simulator. It's still showing the same water, sky, clouds, sun, and trees!? How is this even possible‼?? Where is flight simulator reading texture files from in windows 7? How can it still be showing scenery textures that are no longer installed? The aircraft that I've installed work just fine, but nothing else does. Has anyone else experienced this? I have had absolutely NOTHING but problems and headaches since switching from windows XP to windows 7! And it's not just flight simulator! It's been a complete NIGHTMARE just trying to get the simplest programs to run on this system!

[dadam141]

rex issue?

[SG-19]

You must be doing something wrong somewhere, although win 7 does have some quirks within the OS, I've been running FS9 on a drive away from the rest of the program file's with all the sliders on max set at max, its the same as my FSX,

[Bass]

Are you running fs9 in xp service pack 3 mode and as administrator?
If not do it by right clicking fs9 shortcut on the desktop and change it in "compatible".

[Hagar]

I installed new water textures in flight simulator 2004 the same way I always do,

Can you explain your usual method. Does this addon use an auto-installer?

I can open the texture and scenery folders in the main directory and see that the new textures have indeed overwritten the old ones

Are you sure you're looking in the correct directories? The default location for FS9 in Win7 64-bit is C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9

[Capt_Cronic]

could you please explain exactly what you installed and how ?

[Balsa_Pilot]

I'm the guy that created "Mel's Realistic water textures for FS2004." I've spent weeks and months creating those on my old windows XP machine. I'm well aware of where windows 7 installed FS9 which is C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9. In fact, I had no trouble at all installing my textures over the default ones, and they look as good as they did on my XP machine. I was in the process of improving the sunrise and sunset textures when I noticed that no matter what I did to the textures, nothing changed. I then as a test, installed the default textures that I had backed up, started FS and still had the same water. I then installed "Spikes water environment" (available here on Simviation) started FS and still have the same water. I went to the main directory and opened, scenery/world/texture, and spikes textures are in fact there with their proper names and extensions. No matter what textures I put into the scenery/world/texture folder, nothing changes when I run FS. It's absolutely crazy! Windows 7 stores the fs9 and fsx config files in a folder called "Roaming" I went and looked at the config file for fs9 and didn't see anything that would direct FS to another directory, but it seems that that is what's happening. Otherwise, how can it display textures that are no longer in the scenery folder? I even went as far as doing a windows system restore to when I first installed FS2004, but for some reason the restore failed. I've been a flight simmer for many years and I've never encountered anything as strange as this.

[Capt_Cronic]

those textures are supposed to go into the main texture folder in the root directory

NOT scenery/world/texture

[Balsa_Pilot]

@ Capt_Cronic; The sky, clouds, trees, and sun textures go in the texture folder in the root directory. Water textures go in the scenery/world/texture folder. Except for the "OceanHightField.bmp" which goes in the main texture folder. I'm pretty sure I'm putting everything where it belongs. Unless windows 7 is reading from some strange hidden away folder somewhere. I've been creating my own textures for years. Not just water textures, but also aircraft, runways, buildings...etc.

[Balsa_Pilot]

Problem solved!
After all attempts to fix this problem had failed, I was considering reinstalling flight simulator. It was a task that I really didn't want to do, and I wasn't sure it would even fix the problem. I remembered a program called "Combo Fix" that I've used in the past to remove virus's and fix other problems, and I thought I'd give it a shot even though I was pretty sure I didn't have any virus. I ran Combo Fix and it found this, "c:\windows\SysWow64\DC120fc7_32.dll" and deleted it. It was the only problem in the entire scan that came up. After the scan was complete, I started flight simulator and it immediately began loading new scenery files and I knew that the problem was solved! Whatever that dll file was, was preventing any changes being made in flight simulator. I sincerely hope this information is helpful to others and will spare them the headaches and aggravation that I've went through with this weird problem. Thanks to everyone for their input and suggestions.

Mel.

[Hagar]

Glad you fixed it Mel.

[Balsa_Pilot]

WAIT! THE PROBLEM IS BACK AGAIN!
Here is what happened in detail:
After I ran the Combo fix program, it indeed fixed the problem I was having and everything was back to normal. I was able to install any textures I wanted, and they all worked just fine. I went online and was browsing this site (Simviation) when without warning, my computer went back to the desktop and windows began installing "Critical updates" and then restarted my computer. Once it booted up, there was a small window at the lower right of the screen that I could click to see a detailed list of the new updates that windows had installed, I took a look at it and I didn't really see anything out of the ordinary, and then out of curiosity I started flight simulator again and LO AND BEHOLD I found that I was back to square one! Same textures and scenery that are no longer on my computer! Nothing can be changed! I even went into the settings and changed the resolution from 1920x1080x32, to 1600x900x16 which should have looked really bad, but it had no effect at all! NOTHING CAN BE CHANGED!

I think the only real solution to this problem is to take a ten pound sledge hammer to this new computer, and go out and buy an old one that still has windows xp installed on it!

[Bass]

It looks to me like windows made an auto restoration of your system!!!
Are you able to do the same before this?
Is there anything in your event log?

[Capt_Cronic]

sounds like windows security settings wont let you make changes to the files.

turn off "user account control" setting,
make sure you have full administrator rights,
right click on your fs main folder goto properties and uncheck the read only box then apply to all folders and files.
see if you can install your textures.

if that fails, move the games main folder to another location preferably to another drive.
add your textures and start the game from the new location.
then you can move it back where it was or leave it as is.

[Bass]

If you're not admin, and it seems you are not, then the worst place to install any fs is the stock microsoft games folder.
Move the fs, or get administrator rights on your pc!