Meanwhile, I've stayed busy getting FS9 and FS02 ready to port over to the new rig.
With FS2002, I spent several years flogging on it (back in the day) and, really, I ditched FS02 for FS9 only after I had an issue with FSUIPC and Arrcab and after I had trashed FS02's scenery.cfg file with some "should work in FS2002" scenery files (that didn't).
Several weeks ago, I decided that I would take a shot at trying to fix the old FS2002 install and things have worked out nicely.

The Arrcab and FSUIPC issue turned out to be a corrupted MODULES folder (German FS files) and the Scenery.cfg file is... its own hassle BUT I really threw the sink at FS2002 over the years and this was before I started manually editing my .cfg files. Since then, I took a really good look at the .cfg file and turned off everything that fit into the "OK, why did I install that in the first place?" category. By "turned off", all I did was edit some of the dodgy entries as follows:
[Area.193]
Title=HMS Hermes
Local=scenery\HMS Hermes
Remote=
Active=FALSE
Required=FALSE
Layer=146
If you look at the number in the top line and compare it to the "Layer=" line, you can see
why this is a good first step.

Strange things happen when you edit scenery layers from within the sim.

As it is now, the "bad" scenery is no longer read and my "Go To" menu is working just fine. All I need to do is edit and re-arrange about 60 "[Area.###]" groups in the .cfg file then delete the old files I don't want.
Which brings up the main point to this post. DON'T BE IN A HURRY TO RE-INSTALL YOUR SIM(s) ON A NEW MACHINE. Take some time, sleep on it, and come up with a good plan and work in stages. Last month, I was ready to write off FS2002 entirely on the new machine and just keep the old (broken) install as a kind of a tribute of what's possible and what isn't. Now, its fixed and the only thing left is some keyboard work to clean up the Scenery.cfg file. One thing I discovered, when nothing is going with FS9, its nice to start FS2002 and go bomb around in the aircraft I edited. More than likely, I'm going to transfer ALL of the aircraft (except most of the AI aircraft that are no longer supported) and most of the scenery I've installed. Why not? I spent a lot of time getting it to work in the first place.
With FS9, I'm still holding off. Aside from some "long term" projects I want to work on I'm mostly finished with playing the game of seeing how many shirts I can stuff in the suitcase before it explodes. Which makes it feel odd. I'm not sure what having two "stand alone- no more updates" versions of FS will feel like.
