FSX hanging when starting free flight

[Major Flawes]

I've run into an issue that I see others are having as well trying to start a free flight / multiplayer flight. The issue is that once you click on fly now the screen goes black and nothing happens, the only way to cancel out of the game is to press the windows button on the keyboard and sign out and back in again or if you have a second screen - set up task manager beforehand to cancel the process. Alt-Tab does not work and nor does Alt-enter. FSX was running on my PC ~3 months ago with the same setup as I have today.

Things I have tried that haven't worked:

Loading a custom flight/default flight

Appcrashview - it seems the game doesn't technically crash so there's nothing to show

Windows event viewer - I found several side by side errors which pointed at a C++ redist error, they have all been re-installed, it does show a Kiosk error at some points and also says that something happened to stop FSX talking to windows, maybe they've fallen out?

Running DISM and sfcscannow - no problems found

Removing the logbook.BIN

Removing the FSX.cfg

Removing previous flight files

Re-installing FSX, verifying files etc

Removing all mods

Turning off - xbox game bar, game mode, hardware accelerated GPU scheduling, Win10 variable re-fresh rate

DX10 preview + different screen resolutions including native

Installing included simconnects and DX installers

Restoring Nvidia graphics driver and settings then doing a fresh install

Running in compatibility mode - winxp/7/8

Run as administrator, disable full screen optimisations, high DPI scaling override

I think that's it....

When I am setting up the free flight I can see in task manager that it has GPU 0 - 3D under the GPU engine header, the minute I click free flight the entry disappears. I have a feeling that a recent win10 or Nvidia update may have caused an issue but if anyone has any ideas please let me know.

[ewalker]

Same problem here. The big difference in my case is that I've moved from a Windows 7 laptop to a new Dell Windows 10 desktop with a high end Nvidia GPU. I'm about to give up on both FSX and Steam forever.

[TextRich]

For you both - it's a bit extreme but you don't have much to lose at this point.

a) Remove these folders and move them to a safe place such as a Desktop (mind that you don't overwrite the folders - label them or put them in separate directories in your Desktop:
C:/users/[yourusername]/AppData/Roaming/FSX
C:/ProgramData/Microsoft/FSX
C:/Documents/Flight Simulator X Files
(a) note - you may need to check Show Hidden Items in Windows' File Explorer under View to see a few of the directories.
b) Re-run FSX:SE and say yes and confirm EVERYTHING. Basically you are resetting the entire sim and creating new folders in the place of the three folders listed above that you have removed.
c) See if you can get into the default flight with the Trike and if you still see a black screen hit Alt+Enter to exit full screen mode and go into the more compatible windowed mode.

If that fails try the former distributor of FSX:SE's full uninstall and reinstall procedure. Note you can re-move rather than delete the same folders that I listed above.
https://dovetailgames.kayako.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/47/14/