My Learjet gauges are all missing, and I'm pretty sure it's due to a plane that I installed.  I since have taken off most of my add on planes, and I want to fix my Learjet panel.  I know that I have to use my cd's, but I'm not sure exactly what to do.  Both cd's 2 and 3 only have zip files on them... I don't know which to unzip... if any... thanks for the help!

Heya MadDriver --

You don't have to actually reinstall the entire FS2004 program to get your Learjet gauges back.  I [b]do not[/b] recommend an Uninstall/Reinstall for reasons too many to list here.

I am assuming that you are running Windows XP.
All that you have to do is slide the MS 2004 installation disk #2 into your CD Drive.  Click on Start then My Computer.  Right click your CD Drive icon.  In the drop-down menu Left click on Explore. 

Locate the icon for the file named MSGAME3.CAB.  Right click it also.  In the drop-down menu Left click on Explore as well.  This will list the install files on this CD.

Scroll down the list until you see the Learjet gauge files (or simply press the letter 'L' on the keyboard).  Press and hold down your Ctrl (Control) keyboard key and keep holding it down while you Left click each and every Learjet gauge file.  When you have highlighted all of these files, Right click on the highlight color on any one of these files.  A drop down menu will appear.  Left click Extract.

A "Select a Destination" window will appear.  Browse the directories, locate your FS 2004 Gauges folder, then click the Extract button at the bottom.  The Learjet gauges will then be unzipped and placed into your FS 2004 Gauges folder.

As a suggestion -- When I built my PC I installed two Western Digital 120 Gig harddrives.  One is my Primary and the other is my Secondary.  About once a week (right before I go to bed) I make a FS 2004 Backup by Copy/Paste-ing my [b]entire[/b] FS 2004 main folder (and all of its contents) onto my Secondary harddrive (overwriting everything).  This takes a while, (especially if your FS 2004 is as full of goodies as mine is) that's why I do this before I go to bed.  In the evening when I get home from work it's done. 

Now you may not have a Secondary harddrive like I do.  You can create a Secondary Backups folder in your main FS 2004 Gauges folder and Copy/Paste all of your gauges into it.  That way if anything happens to your gauges in the main FS 2004 folder you can restore the gauges from the Backups folder.

I hope that this helps.

Before doing anything look under the aircraft folder in fs2004 find the learjet45 folder and check to see if the panel folder is still there if it is open it and check the panel cfg file to see if it has been changed.
some times addons will alter a panel cfg file by changing the extension to .bak thus disableing the panel. If this is the case then just change the ext. back to .cfg and you should be good to go.
However if the panel cfg file has been removed then do as graycat has said

That's some really great advice Gary.  I got focused on the hard stuff and forgot the easy stuff.

Another suggestion is to do what Gary said anyway as an additional safeguard.  The entire first day I got FS 2004 was spent backing up my default Aircraft and Panel CFG files, as well as the aircraft I transferred and modified from FS 2002.  In fact, that's the first thing I do when I download and install any new aircraft.

Now I know what some of you are saying.  "Heya Graycat, you said in the post earlier that you Archive your FS 2004 files on a separate hard disk.  You're saying now that you [b]also[/b] backup your backups?  Isn't that a little overboard?  This sounds like something that came from the Department of Redundancy Department to me."  Well yes, I do.  I've found myself deleting aircraft out of my Aircraft folder sometimes.  At one or more occasions I've deleted the wrong one.  I can go to my Secondary Hard Drive and Copy/Paste the aircraft back into FS 2004 and the folder will already contain all of my *.cfg renamed backups.  Saves me time so that I don't have to do it all over again from (cat) scratch.

Anyway,  I'm glad I could help out.