SimConnect missing

[Juha Holopainen]

When starting FSX after a long time in order to update an airport layout for the controller sector file, I ran into a slight problem. Something has caused the SimConnect installation to stop working and data such as the aircraft position are no longer available to other programs. As I don't really use the program nowadays for anything other than checking scenery updates and updating the controller files, I don't know when it ceased to work, but it did still work in August.

Since then, I've done no changes to the setup other than Windows 10 updates, so one of them is a likely suspect. So far I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling all the SimConnect versions and doing a repair of the FSX installation with no change. The SimConnect dll files seem to be in the Windows\assembly folder instead of Windows\WinSxS as they were in a backup I checked, maybe this has something to do with it. But even if I deleted those files, every attempt to reinstall resulted in the files being placed back in the same folder though. Manually copying the files to the WinSxS folder didn't work either, they just got moved away automatically almost immediately.

Reinstalling FSX is something I could consider as a last resort but if the issue lies with Windows, it may not help. A complete Windows reinstall is out of the question just to fix this. Has anyone heard of something like this happening, or even better, know a way to fix it?

[Juha Holopainen]

Never mind. When resuming the fight to fix the issue today, I noticed the WinSxS folder contained almost 18000 items, about 10 times as many as yesterday. The SimConnect folders were among the new items so I started FSX and voilà, it worked. Too bad I had just spent an hour editing the sector file the hard way, having to convert coordinate formats by hand . No idea what happened or what fixed it - probably shutting down the computer - hopefully it stays fixed...