I don't know if anyone can help with this, but I am baffled.  Earlier today my FS2002 stopped working.  When I tried to open it, and error message would come up and it would shut down.  I have no idea what (if anything) I may have done to cause this.  I tried running System Restore and restored my system to a restore point from yesterday (when it was running fine).  That did not work.  I uninstalled and reinstalled FS2002.  Now when I try to open it, the "splash screen" comes up briefly, but then disappears and my desktop comes back up.  No error message anymore, though.

Any suggestions?

Ditto58

Glad you got it working
Something you might want to think about is to make a backup of all addon aircraft & scenery esp. the scenery cfg file. That way if you have to remove & reinstall all you have to do is copy the back ups into there approiate folder do not forget about the scenery cfg file.
This will prevent adding all the addon scenery you had before the problem. Sure saves a lot of time and headaches esp if you have flatten & exclude swithces.