Hi Meridian,
I have spoken to Zen Desk and because this is very likely caused by a third-party application they cannot help. Zen Desk cannot help with third-party applications especially if one or more applications may potentially contain malware or a bug that could potentially corrupt your flight simulator or files/programs on your computer. The advise from Microsoft is to beware of using third-party applications. I say, especially if they are freeware. Beware of any freeware MSFS 2020 application that updates it’s self automatically, or updates files in your community folder or elsewhere on your PC or one that can scan your registry for other MSFS related values. This is all I can say at this time.
I doubt a freeware developer would knowingly write software that could potentially damage a computer however, I think in my case an application, (I have two suspect freeware applications) had code in it or a potential vulnerability which may have opened a backdoor on my PC.
I am not going to name the app/apps that I suspect have a bug because of the implications of being wrong however, I will say that it is the responsibility of everyone to be wary and keep their guard up. There is malware that can disable your security on your computer, in my case it caused Bitdefender to crash while scanning.
My computer was compromised, the threat kept coming back until I removed the suspicious app’ at which time the Microsoft Safety Scanner gave me the all clear. This could have been a false-positive, I could not take the chance! This is a very powerful tool, I recommend everyone to download it as an extra level of protection. Meridian found 16 issues on his computer with this tool. Don’t panic! because this is not unusual during the scan because the scanner will ‘call home’ to check it’s findings against a Microsoft on-line data base and will drop most if not all of it’s initial alerts that pop up during the scan.
My simulator appeared to run better/smoother after my actions!
I am unable to finish looking into my problem because my PC is away being upgraded. Until I get my PC back, there is not much I can do.
Tip: Also try Malwarebytes free, this is a good tool and will run without conflict with other AV software. You might want to enable ‘heuristic file scanning’ too but this could throw up some false-positives.
And finally… I suspect the MSFS folders were still on my computer but had become invisible to the operating system. Difficult to say because my SSD, (on which MSFS was installed) developed a significant size of unallocated space which I had to repair. Everything else remained intact on the drive and unaffected, MSFS had just vanished into the ether! Fortunately my Community Folder was backed up as it vanished too! I use MSFS Add-on-Linker and this app saved much of my Community Folder content and is not suspected of being buggy by me, I have no concerns with this great application.
Some of the bugs being reported to Asobo may not be entirely their fault! Keep this in mind…
BRGDS
Charles.