Golf Sim Clubhouse Forum

I've uninstalled PGA Championship Golf 2000 and reinstalled a number of times, but still have the blank spaces in the Course Manager. Obviously, after using Glary Utilities and Toolbox to do a registry clean, I've still got some files lingering somewhere that the Course Manager is seeing after it's installed. Any ideas what those files are and where? On the last reinstall, I took the advice from some threads here to completely uninstall the Cloaking Tool. I did that before the last registry cleaning. My next step is to run Regedit, but I've never done that in Windows 8 and it's a little scary to me. Any advice? I KNOW the reinstalled Course Manager is "remembering" something in order for the same problem to exist after numerous uninstall/reinstalls. I just need to get whatever it's "remembering" gone.

A little follow-up...."Deep scan" using Toolbox found another 167 registry keys related to Sierra and Sierra-Online and I deleted those, but--alas--a reboot and reinstall later and I'm back at square one: blank slots in the Course Manager and only two libraries loaded in the architect...in spite of the Course Manager "telling" me that all of the stock libraries are "installed."

Whew! System Restore finally did it. Had to dump AVG AntiVirus in order to get it done. No big deal since I can download it for free, but AVG kept preventing the system restore from finishing because it would try to load up automatically during restart before the restore could finish. I also moved ALL of my downloaded libraries and courses to my OneDrive because I realized I had installed some of them directly from the download directory. I think that may have been the culprit because I never cleaned out that directory before trying the numerous re-installs.

Imagine what this really means, though. Headgate Studios' coding of PGA Championship Golf was so tight that it continued to work in a Win 7 and Win 8 environment the same way it worked in XP and earlier versions of Windows. I remember now jacking around with these swap file issues back in 99. The only problem now is that Windows 8 wants to remember every single move you've ever made on the system, so it's storing stuff automatically and doing it all over the place. Glary Utilities, Toolbox (even set to "deep" scan), and Wise Registry Cleaner (which I HIGHLY recommend...because it found hundreds of useless registry entries on "deep" scan that the others didn't) still couldn't find all of those temp, swap, and Sierra Online files and registry keys. I've learned that Windows 8.1 is scary; it's "remembering" everything. It's almost like working with a MAC or Apple product; if you don't know the actual base system architecture, it's useless trying to figure out what it's done/doing with your system.

BTW--As far as the Headgate coding goes....here's a little bit of PGA trivia. Farrell Edwards of Headgate (the author of the architect on the Tiger Woods series) did his master's thesis on a fault I created in Benson Hills while converting from PGA to TW. He was telling his math professors that a "black hole" could be created mathematically in a 3-D grid (i.e.--the architect mesh). They said it was not possible with simple C++ coding. When I somehow screwed up a green texture, crashed, did a data dump and sent him the code from the dump, that was all the "proof" he needed. Somehow the architect had created a negative zero plot point which the software interpreted as infinite negative (i.e.--the "Edwards Black Hole"). We had a whole big long discussion over the phone about it, but it's the biggest thing he remembered from TW development 'cause it inspired his master's degree thesis.

So...the moral of the story is.... watch out what you do in Windows 8 or 8.1 because it's remembering/recording almost everything you do and dumping that memory all over your hard drive in various little obscure folders. I only realized that after doing deep registry scans with Wise Registry Cleaner. It's almost creepy what the system is remembering/recording and still leaving there after a complete un-install and wipe of the drive.

The swap files are at C:\SIERRA\PGA2000 Titanium\SwapFiles. Deleting everything out of that folder and cloaking libraries was always what did the trick for me when I had this problem. Sorry, I probably should have gone into more details before. It's possible an uninstall leaves behind the swap files so they weren't deleted then. I know other things created after the initial install like custom libraries and courses aren't removed during an uninstall.

There are some issues for PGA 2000 in the windows 8 registry that pop up sometimes. Something can get screwed up in there with the courses and they stop showing up in the game. I'd imagine using something to clean it up and then reinstalling the game would fix it. However we discovered another work around -- loading the game on a different windows account. It works because there are separate registry entries for PGA 2000 for each account in windows.

BrianZ111 wrote:The swap files are at C:\SIERRA\PGA2000 Titanium\SwapFiles. Deleting everything out of that folder and cloaking libraries was always what did the trick for me when I had this problem. Sorry, I probably should have gone into more details before. It's possible an uninstall leaves behind the swap files so they weren't deleted then. I know other things created after the initial install like custom libraries and courses aren't removed during an uninstall.

There are some issues for PGA 2000 in the windows 8 registry that pop up sometimes. Something can get screwed up in there with the courses and they stop showing up in the game. I'd imagine using something to clean it up and then reinstalling the game would fix it. However we discovered another work around -- loading the game on a different windows account. It works because there are separate registry entries for PGA 2000 for each account in windows.

LOL Don't you just "love" (hate) Windows 8?! It TOTALLY figures that logging on with a different account would do the trick. Like I implied above, though, that's almost sick.

Thanks for the restore point tip you gave in other threads. I was using that as my fall back position and it worked great! After reading it, I kept it in the back of my mind, and....after what I was learning about Windows 8/8.1, I came to see it was the only real solution to get back a "virgin" drive that didn't think it "knew" what I was doing during the re-install. I now have a "virgin" install of PGA...and I'm determined to not screw it up. Thanks again for the tip!