Uninstalling FS Spotlights problem

[Ray Proudfoot]

This is not a cry for help as I’ve resolved the situation but felt compelled to post because what happened shouldn’t have.

A couple of weeks ago I was getting the Enigma message even though my FS PC has no antivirus and I have a genuine copy of Concorde. I searched the forum and one or two posts pointed to FS Spotlights possibly being the reason. Given I never fly after dark I could think of no good reason to have Spotlights installed so I uninstalled it. That was the end of the Enigma messages.

Today when looking in Event Viewer I noticed several warnings about FSL service unable to start even though its set to Automatic. They went back several days to when I uninstalled Spotlights. I tried to start the service manually but a message appeared saying a file could not be found. I wondered if it could be related to uninstalling Spotlights.

So I downloaded and installed the latest version of Spotlights. Rebooted and the service was running. Why would uninstalling Spotlights cause the service to stop running and delete a file required for the service?

Anyway, there was worse to come. When I looked at my DLL.XML file there were only two entries in it. A dll one and Spotlights. No mention of the three FSL DLLs required for Concorde.

Fortunately I had a backup so was able to restore all the entries.

It would seem installing Spotlights cleans out the existing entries in DLL.XML. Anyone care to comment?

[Lefteris Kalamaras]

Ray,

the FSLSpotlights uninstaller should not delete the three other XML entries, only the Spotlights-related one.

The FSLService is only used for FSLSpotlights, so it makes sense it should be removed - not sure why it wasn't uninstalled however, it should also have been.

[Ray Proudfoot]

Hi Lefteris,

It wasn’t the uninstaller that removed those entries. It was the installer that did. It appears to have created a new DLL.XML overwriting the existing one.

I’m 100% certain of this as I’ve been flying a different aircraft in P3D for the last few days and if my DLL.XML didn’t contain the AS16 and FSUIPC entries I would have known about it.

Have a look at what the Spotlights installer does.