Not sure if this is of any help with your problems but I posted this a while back on issues I had with my Hotas.
I get the impression the quality of the potentiometers in the thrustmaster sticks is pretty poor, mine were forever spiking and I ended up with such high deadzones to get round them I hardly had any usable movement left.
And as I mentioned in the post I needed to remove the thrustmaster software to get access to the windows calibration option.
I’ve since moved on to a Honeycomb alpha but still use the hotas for the throttle and as a set of extra buttons I can assign