Sorry to hear this Mason. Getting away from it though will be nice and relaxing. :d You'll be able to think 'outside' the box and see things more clearly.
The sad thing is that its probably something so darn basic that its going to be hilarious. (At least lets hope so).
Wouldnt it be cool if you could shop for a computer by 'running' FSX on it 'first' to see what its like, then buy it and take it home and start flying right then!! No tweaking, just 'run' the dang thing! lol... Ahh to dream....
In the mean time, remember us developers that have to make planes. Your burdens are 3 fold then. Two sims, two platforms, two codes of parts, two gauge codes, two versions of materials, with FSX having 4 pages of material data per material item, new resolution technology that is enhanced by quadrupling the textures into one giant sheet / bitmap, different airfile tunes, different camera view systems (panel based versus config file based), etc, etc, etc. Making the right and proper plexi the first time for FSX took perhaps 1 full week, full time, trying to figure out why it wasnt transparent, then why it wasnt reflecting, then this, then that. My nose hairs turned crispy gray that week. Horrible.....
So remember, there are alot of us out there that dont have it easy either.
By the way.. Isnt 'Autotropic' or something similar sounding, the setting for cross line focus and resolution? (Indiosoptic or autotropic, something like that). I had an issue with this a few months back on my rig and I ended up downloading Catalyst and experimented for a couple of hours and finally found 8X to work perfect. 16X ran it faster, but wasnt as nice as 8X. But I had to tune this outside of FSX. FSX couldnt tune the cross lines to be gone...
Bill