You’re welcome! 
I hope the above links may be useful for you.
Thanks
The MSFS Team
Maybe not quite the same thing, but folks might be interested in this:
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Yesterday I was stuck on the Checking for Updates screen for quite a while too.
Knowing that it usually only takes a few seconds, I closed down the sim, started it again and all was like it should be: it checked for an update a few seconds, there was no update and the sim proceeded to load.
Had there been an update it would have told me the size of the update and presented me with an Update button to confirm. There are no secret background updates.
Hi, Chewwy94.
I’ve taken a screen clipping of your advice and placed it on my desktop for consultation should I have this issue again.
All the same, something was running my internet connection flat out (I check this by looking at my ethernet in the Performance page of Task Manager; it’s a reliable proxy because the only ethernet connection my computer has is to my router) for the roughly eight minutes I was seeing the Checking for Updates message in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
And when I checked the Processes page to see which apps were showing network activity in the Network column - yes, the only one was Microsoft Flight Simulator. I’m reasonably sure it was running at the same speed as my ethernet connection but it didn’t occur to me at the time that it might be a good idea to take a screen clipping for evidence.
To which all I can say is
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same here, checking for updates downloaded 600mb of… “something”. and then it continued
i think its pretty clear that it is downloading something
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Hi @TOLOWTERRAIN723,
Please see my above response:
You’ll know there is a download in progress if you are on the Installation Manager screen with a progress bar located at the bottom. There are no package downloads occurring during the Checking For Updates screen.
Thanks
The MSFS Team
Infinite ‘checking for updates’-loop 6 out of 10 times when trying to start the sim! Xbox Series X
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…yes and perhaps it was checking for updates in a hard loop thrashing data back and forth due to a bug giving the appearance of downloading something? I think at this point everyone agrees the sim is stuck however why this is happening is not known. I believe MS/Asobo have recognized there is an issue here and the interim recommended course of action has been communicated via a community manager. Note: even if the root cause was incorrect date/time I would consider it a bug as in that case at a minimum it should stop the process and provide this feedback to the user and not get “stuck”.
Keep in mind that if it was re-downloading the entire sim and you stopped the sim via task manager in the middle I would expect some corruption and you wouldn’t be able to restart the sim successfully.
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Yes, I believe this to be true
This is false. There is obviously interchange of information between the local computer and the server, something like: local computer asks for information about the time stamp/version number of the current version; the server responds with the appropriate informaton; after downloading this information, the local computer checks this against the local computer contents.
So there is a (small) download necessary for this process to work, but not a “package” download. From the evidence on my system, and that from others quoted above, it may be this download which is causing the problem - although the download is small, it may for example be caught up in re-iterative loop if there is some sort of unexpected error repeatedly requiring the same download. So please do not ignore the evidence.
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Inclined now to agree with the last two posters.
To us it looks like MSFS is making, e.g. a 250MB download, but what it’s actually doing is downloading 250B - possibly the same 250B - a million times.
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Launched MSFS 3 times tonight, twice it got stuck on Checking for Updates indefinitely. Had to shut it down. There is definitely something going on that wasn’t happening until a couple of days ago.
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…same here, last two attempts starting the sim “Checking for updates” more than a minute…
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Whether it’s specifically a ‘package’ is irrelevant. Something is clearly broken in the checking for updates process which is genuinely causing huge amounts of data to be downloaded.
I’ve just watched it receive ~500Mb/s for 5 mins, which would be almost 20GB.
It’s ironic that this seems to happen at consistently higher bit rates than I’ve ever seen when an update actually is being downloaded.
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Everything is fine here…
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…waited it out the 3rd time around (after rebooting), did note the 200 mbit/s download from flightsimulator.exe…around 5-6 minutes later…loading
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Just observing the same. Checking for updates takes longer than usual and it seems to be downloading something.
Eventually it finished and second start was again quick as usual.
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I dont think there is actually an update going on.
I never make or change liveries except this once, this week.
I did this yesterday and finished today just to tweak one specific livery.
Not being too experienced doing this I obviously several times within a short time period have started and shutdown the Sim several times. After a few times suddenly the ‘checking for updates’ screen appeared. Yesterday and today.
Now I may be TOTALLY wrong here but it would seem that there may possibly be some logic in the sim or backend that notes these short starts and stops so then checks if all is well or if there needs to be some update/repair.
I do notice that something is going on with the drive.
I am probably totally wrong here but that would seem to be a logical explanation ?
It’s happened to me more than 10 times today, I noticed that on my computer the simulator can’t load at all, getting stuck on “checking for updates” for more than 2 hours (I didn’t feel like waiting any longer).
Normally, on my system, (not always), the problem is solved after deleting the .dat files inside the SceneryIndexes folder and restarting the system; even then, it takes about 30 to 40 minutes on the “checking for updates” screen, but manages to proceed to the menu after the wait.
BTW, I need to make this “fix” while trying to play on a running a fresh and vanilla version of the simulator downloaded from Steam. (I had an older installation, but after these long loading times I reinstalled it thinking that some new update or patch had corrupted some file or something.)
After closing the simulator, I still have to make the “fix” again, because it will be stuck again in the searching for updates screen.
Yesterday it was working fine.
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Hi,
Glad that I am not the only one whose MSFS gets stuck on “Checking for updates” lately. Usually a restart will help on my system. Still it is annoying.
Will MS/Asobo fix this before MSFS 2024 arrives? Sure hope so.
Usually it helped just to exit via ALT+F4 after getting stuck on the infinite “Checking for Updates” screen and the next start would go through. Now it takes about 10 times, closing and restarting before anything moves…that’s really annoying.
PC - MS Store version.
1 Like