I can see one thing that the Official patch cleared up right away.
I was getting some serious jerky movements of the mouse and horrible frames per seccond. Following the instructions for that patch, (I think the deleting of the msvcrt.dll did it), it made everything run nice and smooth. I havn'e really taken the plane out for a spin too much yet but I can already tell that there's improvement. And I no longer seem to crash the program when a mission ends.
Now I'm looking at the supermods. I'm going to download them both and try each out individually. You guys rock for helping me find this stuff !!! Now at least I'll have a copy I can toss on a CD or DVD of these things so if they go "missing" or "hard to find" on the net any further, I'll at least have copies.
My next goal is to actually fly the thing without plowing at supersonic speed into the ground. I'm used to slow moving naval sims. This is.. a whole new ball game. I can't believe I had this sim collecting dust in my closet all these years without realising how cool it was.
Any other suggestions you guys have for downloads or tutorials or anything to enhance my sim experience ?