Combat Flight Simulator 3 locks up at a random time while playing the game.  This has happened every time (about 40-50 times, so far).  It has happened 5 seconds into the game, during the preview, just after takeoff, or even 45 minutes into the flight.  When it locks up, the sound continues to play but the screen turns into large pixels, the mouse doesn't move, and the system is completely frozen.  Neither ALT-TAB nor CTRL-ALT-DEL do anything.  The only solution is a forced power off by holding down the power button.

I have tried every solution posted on the web (both Microsoft documents and this forum), including: clean boot, rebooting using MSConfig to disable everything unnecessary, disabling all other programs including antivirus, uninstalling and reinstalling video drivers, uninstalling and reinstalling CFS3, changing certain settings in CFS3 Config (including disabling Dual Pass), ensuring drivers are up to date, and several others.  Nothing has made a difference.

My computer is a 1 GHz Pentium III with 384 MB RAM running Windows XP Pro, SP2.  I have a NVidia 4 Ti4200 with 64MB video RAM, currently using the driver set 6.13.10.3082 - though I have tried other drivers without success in CFS3.

I am an advanced computer user and am familiar with my system.  This problem has never occurred in any other program, but so far I have never been able to run CFS3 without this problem happening at some point.  Does anyone have a solution?

Try a system restore to before you had this problem.

He has better specs than me and CFS3 runs fine on my computer. As long as he doesn't press it too hard he should have no complaints.

Willbo:  Most of the time, the computer will eventually reboot itself after an extended time.  Other times, it will just do nothing.  I think the longest I've let it sit is around 5 minutes before shutting it down.

Woodlouse: A system restore to before I installed the game?

bzhyoyo:  No add-ons have been installed.  I did install the patch for v3.1.  I'd rather not give up and uninstall the program yet, though.  I followed simviation forum instructions when reinstalling it the first time.  I don't need it to run lightning-fast with blazing graphics... just to run.  And it does, really great actually, right up until the moment it locks up.

Regarding the power suggestion or CPU overheating.  No, those are not the problem.  If either of those were the case, it would not be specific to this program.  I play many other processor-demanding games, yet have not had this problem with anything else, ever.  But it occurs every single time with CFS3.

I'm thinking it's got to be some kind of video driver conflict of some sort, but I don't know what.  I forgot to mention that I have an LCD screen - but I follow Microsoft's advice and run it in analog mode while playing CFS3. (have tried digital too.)

Unfortunately, while I browsed for this answer at another flight sim board, ADWARE was downloaded to my machine automatically (which really pissed me off) and my antivirus apparently didn't stop it.  Long story short, I can't even boot windows outside of safe mode right now and will probably have to reinstall unless I can figure out the problem, probably somewhere in the registry.  Dammit.