MSFS 40th Anniversary not starting

[robert.james2]

After the Steam update today I now find that Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary edition will not start. It was fine yesterday, but this evening when I click Play in the library, the entry in the list on the left shows running, but then a few seconds later it momentarily shows 100% and then the main button goes back to the green Play button.
Is this a known issue with the latest update? It seems a coincidence that all was OK until the update.
Thanks

[znurtdog]

Me too! I'm going crazy trying to fix

[ギョー]

Me too, it is annoying.
Clicking Play causes only causes Cloud Status to update to "checking..." then "up to date" updating the last play to now, and then stopping the game.

I've tried checking the installed files via Properties, and even uninstalling and reinstalling and still have the same issue.

(https://streamable.com/m9m31h)

Can't find any other information on this issue anywhere.

[ギョー]

I managed to fix the launching issue on my system by reinstalling "Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015"

1. Used "browse local files" option to open C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\MicrosoftFlightSimulator

2. Attempted to run FlightSimulator.exe file there

3. Got System Error dialogue "The code execution cannot proceed because VCOMP140.DLL was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem."

4. Investigated cause of that issue

5. Found I could fix the missing .dll by reinstalling Visual C++ Redistributable using files from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=48145

6. Game now loads

[Doctor Hades]

I am having exactly the same issue trying to start MS Flight Simulator 2020 on Windows 11 24H2 but I don't think the version of Windows is the issue here since I have had it installed since June and the game was working fine up until recently. I actually had the game installed to a hard drive due to it being over 400 GB in size but moved it last week to an SSD. I thought moving the install and editing the UserCfg file to point to the new location was what had broken it at first. I also deleted 65 GB of cache files from the hidden folder under AppData/Roaming as it was filling up my C: drve.

Like the opening poster, the game appears to start loading then after 10-15 seconds the blue button with an X changes back to the green Play button. Looking at the Event log shows that FlightSimulator.exe crashed due to an issue with, I believe, it is urtcbase.dll. I think this file is part of a Visual C++ library but I may be wrong?

I have revalidating the game several times - no issues reported - and even uninstalled and reinstalled it to a different drive to no avail. The game just does not want to load.

I haven't tried the suggestion in post #3 yet though so maybe that will be worth a try?

The irony is that I have just refunded a working MS Flight Simulator 2024 - well, it ran but extremely poorly and was overall a disappointment - to just stick with MS Flight Simulator 2020 for now but now that doesn't work. The cynic in me wants to believe this is intentional to 'motivate' me toward buying the new game...

*EDIT*
Sorted out the crashing issue on my PC. It turned out that I had the incorrect NVIDIA game profile for this game that contained a setting carried over from an earlier driver that, once removed, allowed the game to load and run as normal on 566.14.

The reason the profile was wrong was because I edit in the changes for games using the NVIDIA SLI Profile Manager tool with each new graphics driver update to retain any corrections (the default one has had numerous errors - wrong executables, incorrectly named games, duplicated games, etc - carried over for years now) and changes I've made from the previous driver. I'd obvious missed that one while editing in the changes using Notepad++.

It would seem that anyone using a clean install of the 566.14 graphics driver should have no problems running this game.