How To...Fix The FS2000 Previous Flight Problem

By Peter van der Vlugt

It was one of those mornings in a weekend that I had nothing planned to do except for flightsimming. Since my oldest son, Bart, who at almost 9 years of age is a flightsim freak just like me, had been simming the evening before, I was wondering at what gate at Stavanger Sola airport he parked our Braathens Safe B737-400 aircraft on his flight from Amsterdam. Yes, we have FS2000 set up to start up with the Previous Flight as default flight, so for me it is sometimes a surprise where and with what aircraft FS comes up the next time. That particular morning I knew where it would start up since my son had told me, however he forgot to tell me one minor detail...

Anyway I started up FS2000 and after a while the screen at the right showed me what I had always been afraid off. "Oh no!" was my first thought, what had happened? FS2000 showed me the error message box (translated from Dutch) "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be closed. Please contact your vendor...". No, I will not contact my vendor! He can't help me, this is one of the many stupid message boxes from Windows that I hate!

I closed down the message box and tried to start up again. Same problem. The next logical step was to reboot my computer and try it again. Same problem. I checked my Predator 3D Pro Joystick function, you never know. Same problem. Started up without joystick. Same problem.

Aaaaaarghhhh! Now what? This was a disaster; I just hated the idea of installing FS2000 completely all over again, not to mention all the scenery, aircraft and other add-ons. It would take me at least two or three days of work to get it back in the state as it was before this problem.

Next I tried to figure out what I had installed in the week before, but it was not much. Just one new aircraft downloaded from FlightSim.Com and the newest demo version of FsTraffic. Since I make backup copies of my Scenery.cfg and FS2000.cfg files when add-ons are installed, I started to compare them but found nothing strange except for the additional things installed by FsTraffic. Then I started to ask my son on how he closed down FS2000 when it was last seen alive, under what conditions, which aircraft, the weather etc. He said exactly the same; he had parked the Braathens B737 at the gate and then started to look for another aircraft. There it was where he found the new ones added by FsTraffic and he had hopped into an FsTraffic Follow Me Truck and closed down FS after a while. BINGO!

My Previous Flight was in a state that FS2000 crashes on! The solution is simple, just open the FS2000.cfg and look for the "SITUATION=PILOTS\Previous Flight" sentence.

Change the "Previous Flight" to any other situation that resides in the 'Pilots' folder and the problem is gone; FS2000 will start up with that situation. In my case I changed FS2000.cfg to the following:

Before...

...After

After FS2000 is running again exit the program and start up again to set it back to Previous Flight as default flight if you still want to keep this as the default flight.

I tried to reproduce the error but I could not get it back anymore. It seems to be a combination of several factors (Aircraft/scenery) that caused FS2000 to crash on start up. To me it happened only three times in the past two months. But since I enjoy the Previous Flight feature very much, I am not going to change it; we now know what the Previous Flight Problem is.

Peter van der Vlugt
peter.vander.vlugt@hetnet.nl

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