Quote Originally Posted by jgf View Post
This furthers my suspicion that it's a basic incompatibility with newer systems. I've had similar problems with other games predating Vista/W7; such as trying a program launcher utility that placed a series of tabs across the top of my desktop, in several games there then appeared a black band across the top of the screen, stopping the launcher before starting the games cleared this up. A favorite race sim is unusable since attempting to access the control configuration page merely gets five seconds of black screen then a return to the main menu. Tech help basically said there was nothing I could do and went into great detail about "overlays", "DX calls", and a deep discussion of the differences in how XP and Vista/W7 handle graphics.

I did find that the type of FSAA - multisampling, supersampling, etc. - used in FS9 in Vista made a difference, especially with an nvidia card. At one point I had a black window on the aircraft preview screen and the inflight scrolling messages were just a black bar, changing the AA type eliminated this. This hasn't been an issue since going to an ATi card.

BTW, I often prefer 2D panels also, especially for landing.
Thanks for your help, I have disabled all sim messages and text so the panels are remaining for the time being.