I actually got the thing working. After I bought a 6200. Go figure.
It ran fine in DirectX but not OpenGL. Benchmark was giving a low score for OpenGL. I uninstalled the drivers and reinstalled the original MSI Starforce Drivers from the disk supplied and the OpenGL benchmark worked great - gave a score of about 65%. I thought, hmm, OK, lets see if I can find any later MSI drivers online, downloaded, installed, and although performance didnt increase, it remained steady and working fine.
I have got the 6200 today, installed it, and - guess what - OpenGL doesnt work. It seems to be some kind of incompatibility with the drivers, and the incompatibility seems fairly random! It's a problem a few other people have had in the past, with nobody really knowing the answer.
I have posted this problem in other forums, and the best advice was to 'buy another card' which is a pretty pathetic piece of advice, point proven above. In some cases people were talking to me like i'm some kind of idiot - which I don't take kindly to, but hey, I guess thats the net!
I'm now trying to download drivers for the new card from the manufacturer in the hope that they might solve this new problem (although I would have thought the bundled drivers would have done the trick). I will try a complete driver clean and go for it again. I'll let you know.
But for anyone who is having the same problem - it p***** you off yeah? Download a benchmark tester (such as Benchmar4.0 from
http://www.bluechillies.com/details/9988.html - it saves having to run a game over and over) Check your drivers - and the best advice I can give is check driver compatibility with your card (age of card, version of drivers etc), and if possible download the drivers direct from the CARD manufacturers website (e.g. MSI) rather than the chipset manufacturer (e.g. Nvidia). This seemed to help me out - and I hope it helps others, this is one hell of an annoying problem!
My system still crashes, but after submitting an error report to Microsoft, it came back saying that the error is due to a major component (mobo, CPU, PSU, RAM) malfunctioning. So, I guess its a complete system overhaul and no stable flight-simming til then!
Cheers guys for trying to help anyways.
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr.