menu bar crashes

[Hokkaido_Emi]

One of the biggest problems in fsx is when your using the menu bar frequently for example changing the time and date which people do quite frequently etc,in fact no matter your going to use on that menu will eventually sooner or later cause it to crash, for example, you set up your flight, you end up in game and discover it's changed to night time and you want day time or its the wrong season. There can be a lot of reasons why you want to use this menu frequently.

However please don't delete or replace UIAutomationCore.dll from either your system32 folder or your WoW64 folder, because that will also cause weird and unwanted things to happen to your operating system.

Inastead go to this site and download the said file http://www.search-dll.com/dll-files/download/uiautomationcore.dll.html

and put it in your root folder and not in either of the other 2! FSX will look into it's own backyard first to try and find this file.


The site and the file are genuinely safe to use and download from. Remember to put this into your fsx root folder and no where else. It will stop all those fullscreen crashes using the menu.or when you flit back and forth between between full / windowed mode.

This should help a lot of people out enjoy captains!

[gspectre]

Odd, I never had a crash from using the Menu Bar in either FSX or FSX:E. The only thing I like to use it for is to see all the aircraft flying around.

[APUtech]

I had similar menu issues from time to time in both FSX and FSX Gold when using the menu repeatedly for various things, or more often than not, opening the "kneeboard" (Shift-F10), which seemed to cause a crash just about every time I opened it. I installed a fresh copy of UIAutomationCore.dll into my FSX/FSX Gold directories and the menu/kneeboard crashes all but stopped.

I've never had such a crash with FSX:SE, and 2 years, 3 weeks, 4600 hours later, I still haven't.

[Hokkaido_Emi]

Originally posted by APUtech:

I had similar menu issues from time to time in both FSX and FSX Gold when using the menu repeatedly for various things, or more often than not, opening the "kneeboard" (Shift-F10), which seemed to cause a crash just about every time I opened it. I installed a fresh copy of UIAutomationCore.dll into my FSX/FSX Gold directories and the menu/kneeboard crashes all but stopped.

I've never had such a crash with FSX:SE, and 2 years, 3 weeks, 4600 hours later, I still haven't.

When I put in a certain tweak into my fsx.cfg that stops my blurries with orbx, its not 100% every time, but much better without the tweak. My menu bar would start lagging really badly , then the background would have issues were it was trying to draw the image (you could see the outline of a plane in white in a background of white), as soon as i put that dll into my main folder it immediately stopped, in fact it's stopped other types of crashes too. so although perhaps not many people will need to use it, perhaps some will, and its better to get it from this source than some virus infected mess of a site claiming it has such files and it doesnt.

[gspectre]

Well, you might have something. I just checked my FSX directory and apparently. I do have UIAutomationCore.dll there but, unless it's been updated, mine is 149KB and yours is 156KB.

[Dr Nico]

The menu crash and Uiautomationcore.dll fix are a very old story, back in the early days of FSX boxed edition.

Uiautomationcore.dll is a Windows system dll that is used by many apps, to get access to other app's menus.
Unfortunately, later versions of this dll made FSX to crash, probably an incompatibility bug in FSX.

But fortunately, Windows dll mechanism searches for dlls first in the app folder, before seeking them in the windows and system folders.
So placing a compatible-with-FSX Uiautomationcore.dll in FSX main folder turnarounds this dll issue.

As you may have noticed, FSX Steam is already delivered with a version of Uiautomationcore.dll in its main directory, so Uiautomationcore.dll tweak is no longer needed.

3 pitfalls however that faced the early Uiautomationcore.dll tweakers of the old Fsx:

- Incompatibility: not all versions of Uiautomationcore.dll were compatible with Fsx or did fix the menu crash
- 64 bits and 32 bits versions exist, but FSX uses the 32 bits version of course. Many were confused with this because using the 64 bits versions on their brand new 64 bits system
- Clean DLL cache: whenever you add or change the dll in FSX folder, you need to clean windows dll cache so that this new dll is taken into account. So either logoff or better restart your computer, otherwise, you won't see the benefit of your dll change.

And last word:
NEVER EVER DELETE the windows system Uiautomationcore.dll in system folders. Some early tweakers were doing this, a total nonsense that will bring your Windows system unstable.

[Solid Snack]

I never had this crash on my old PC, but with the new fresh install, and however many windows updates later, this is a way too frequent occurrence now. Most annoying is when you are doing long range flights (10+ hours) and frequently have to accelerate and decelerate time, and getting a crash 5km from the runway because you want to open up the map to confirm your nav and ils headings are correct.

Trying your fix now, hope it works.

[Tsarcasm]

Just gonna add my two cents. My game rarely crashes. When it does though, it's usually because I either right clicked or went to the menu bar. Now I'm very active with the menu bar becuase of the tacpack so I'm always doing something with my menu/side menu. I've known about uiautomation since boxed and have always used it. Doesn't help in this case. Seems to happen when I've only been flying for hours. (Computer either hot or pretty slow at this point). It's just a problem with FSX.

[Headhunter5000]

I can confirm on Windows 10, replacing UIAutomationCore.dll in the FSX directory by the one from C:\Windows\SysWOW64 fixes the crashes when using the menu bar. Replacing it by an even older version from some dll websites did NOT help!

[TextRich]

Nice tip, thanks. I get very occasional crashes using the menu bar in FSX:SE and I didn't realize it can cause crashes in some system.

[hejing195]

Originally posted by Headhunter5000:

I can confirm on Windows 10, replacing UIAutomationCore.dll in the FSX directory by the one from C:\Windows\SysWOW64 fixes the crashes when using the menu bar. Replacing it by an even older version from some dll websites did NOT help!

Thanks a lot!

[Dr Nico]

Originally posted by hejing195:

Originally posted by Headhunter5000:

I can confirm on Windows 10, replacing UIAutomationCore.dll in the FSX directory by the one from C:\Windows\SysWOW64 fixes the crashes when using the menu bar. Replacing it by an even older version from some dll websites did NOT help!

Thanks a lot!

But the UIautomationcore.dll in C:\Windows\SysWOW64 is a 64 bits DLL
It can't and won't be loaded by 32 bits FSX, and so if you replaced the one in FSX folder with this 64 bits DLL, FSX will use the one in C:\Windows\System32, which comes with Win10

So If it it works fine like this, it means FSX is now compatible again with UIautomationcore.dll delivered by WIndows 10 updates!

It's been a long time since I did not fly FSX, so I cannot test on my end
Only thing I know is that in the year 2017', FSX was incompatible with latest 32 bits UIautomationcore.dll, and thus Dovetail included an older one as a workaround to this issue, delivered with FSX SE