The 3d cockpit on the F-16 is like that. There are no gauges in it nor a hud. Only the 'blank' background picture of the cockpit.
Crash

:-? My HUD works in VC.
It's been so long since I did it, but think I'm using a different panel config. that came with either an update for, or a different release of that panel. I think I kept the original panel bitmaps and gauges that came with the Viper download, but replaced the panel.cfg with an updated one. I'm sorry, I just can't recall right now, but I'll look through my backups later to see what I did.