I cant find visual studio in the control panel.
That would be the problem in the first place: it's just not normal you won't see it, because BOTH FSX and all our installers install a MS Visual Studio 2005 redistributable package and, since FSX installs the 2005 standard version, and we install the 2005 SP1 version, on a properly installed FSX system, you should see at least two entries for the runtimes.
This seems to indicate there is some kind of problem with your system libraries, and it's probably the cause why the programs are not running.
In any case, try to just download and install all the 3 files I've suggested, even if you don't see anything to uninstall. They might work.