Coatl installation problem after QW SP 2 installation

[ofentress]

Umberto...............
Yes, I did follow those instructions and the error message did disappear however..........
Coatl and associated files show up in the modules section of FSX but when FSX is started, the addon previously in the menu bar is no longer there.
I found a Coatl file in one of the sceneries and installed from there. Could there be a more recent file than what I have? This one shows it to have been created on October 27th, 2009.

Jack Fentress

[virtuali]

Could there be a more recent file than what I have? This one shows it to have been created on October 27th, 2009.

This is wrong, because it's a very old version. The cause of this, is likely your antivirus has mistakenly identified the couatl.exe as a threat, so it blocked its download/installation, which is why you are stuck with the old version.

As suggested many times on this forum, always install with the antivirus turned OFF entirely and then, BEFORE trying to launch FSX, configure it to exclude the following files from scanning:

YourFSXFolder\bglmanx.dll
YourFSXFolder\fsdreamteam\couatl.exe

YourFSXFolder it's usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X, if you installed it in the default folder.

- Now you can turn the antivirus back on, and launch FSX.

- Check you are seeing BOTH the "Addon Manager" menu AND the "Couatl powered products" menu under the "Addons" menu.

Best solution, instead, would be switching to a more realiable antivirus that doesn't mistakenly reports false positives. We suggest the free Microsoft Security Essential which, on top of being free and always updated without requiring any subscription, doesn't generate false positives with our products and, even in case it might in the future, is still configurable to exclude specific files from scannning.

[ofentress]

Umberto......
Before I try your suggestions, where is the download location for the most current Coatl? I just want to be as accurate as possible.

Jack F.

[virtuali]

It's always included in both the Stand-Alone Addon Manager and any of our scenery's installers, and it's fetched from the internet so, it's guaranteed to always be the latest version, provided (of course) the antivirus doesn't interfere.

[ofentress]

Umberto............
Well, I downloaded from your Website, anti virus, firewall turned off,configured the 2 files as mentioned, anti virus back on, started FSX. No error message, and add on appeared in the FSX menu bar with Couatl products and add on manager. At least that part of things worked. It looks as though I'm going to have to re-install most of my payware aircraft as a side effect of all of this trouble.
Thanks for the help.

Jack

[virtuali]

It looks as though I'm going to have to re-install most of my payware aircraft as a side effect of all of this trouble.

No, you don't. Why you think you need to reinstall anything ?

You initially had a message from the Addon Manager, asking to update it with the Stand-Alone version, that was the only thing to do, and if the antivirus blocked the Couatl update, the worse it could happen, that ONLY FSDT sceneries might not work until you get the update, but it won't affect anything else.

[ofentress]

Umberto.........
It was the stand alone version that I installed. I had the anti virus turned off as you suggested. Now the following aircraft have no landing gear and have nothing functioning - Level D, PMDG, Quality Wings, CLS (probably some others since I didn't test any more). Strangely the Cessna works just fine since the default aircraft don't seem to be affected.
Sorry to be such  abother with this.

Jack

[virtuali]

It was the stand alone version that I installed. I had the anti virus turned off as you suggested. Now the following aircraft have no landing gear and have nothing functioning - Level D, PMDG, Quality Wings, CLS (probably some others since I didn't test any more).

But that doesn't depend in any way from the Addon Manager or Couatl, regardless of their version. As I've said, if an old version is loaded for any reason, the only products that might be affected are our own.

If those airplanes requires their own modules on the DLL.XML or EXE.XML files, if something happened to those files, their own modules might not being loaded.

It's possible that either you have corrupted the XML files trying to fixing the problem manually (our installers, including the QW one, can't corrupt any XML files, because they use the standard, official, Microsoft XML parsing routines to modify them). Or, it's possible that you run another installer in the meantime, which has issues with parsing standard XML files in the correct way as XML and wrongly parse them as text files, the PMDG is known to have this issue for example.

To minimize this risk, we even run a specific official W3C utility, that clean the XML and make it formatted perfectly, so even less robust installers that runs after our own will never be confused, but if it has somehow failed to run (antivirus, maybe, but it would really a buggy antivirus the one that would block the official W3C formatting tool...), it might be possible that *another* installer that you ran after our own, failed to parse the XML file correctly (this is a fault of the *other* installer) and corrupted it.

And of course, our installers also make a safety backup of your XML files as they were before running them so, in case something fails (like the computer crashing in the middle of an install), it should be possible to retrieve them. They are named dll_xml_before_addon_manager and exe_xml_before_addon_manager and are located in the same folder as the normal XML files, which is %APPDATA%\Microsoft\FSX

[ofentress]

Umberto.......
I apologize for being so late with this reply.  Thanks to your suggestions I got things working as they should.  No further problems.

Jack Fentress