OK! Let's get right to business:

Loading was uneventful which of course translates to no problems...all 4
discs. ;-)

But then...guess who has an Nvidia card? FX5600 AGP 8X w/256 MB on-board
video DDR. As expected [and a tip o' the hat to an old cyber amigo and
his excellent website, Roy Chaffin] the Nvidia card produced the black
screen for 2D. But, ahhhh, I was prepared for that and so the first
order of business was to dump the 44.03 detonator driver and move up to
the latest [courtesy of the Guru website] 45.20 'with' the already
proven 44.67 driver as 'insurance.' So, in goes the 45.20 detonator
driver and...and....black screen in 2D! :-(

Panic! Hey, there are worse things so I decided to experiment and
brought up the Nvidia icon on the task bar and recalled reading
somewhere that a user UNCHECKED the Nvidia 'anti-aliasing' and the
'anisotropic filtering' so I tried unchecking that and bingo--- all was
well! FS2004 came in with no hitch!

Like some others I suppose and out of pure habit, I switched to Meigs
[*didn't see Daley's 'trenches' though---don't get me started on that
one!] for a short hop to O'Hare. Perfect. Graphics very good [I use
1152X864] and I found the yoke [CH VP-Pro] controls very responsive in
this sim. Since I just got the sim today, I left much of the settings at
default value save for the resolution but from I can see, I'm satisfied.
Now I'll put the sim through its paces and of course add some sim
community aircraft and other sim community produced goodies.

I even took in our good friends John and Martha King and their encore
how-do and welcome thing to yet another version of FS and I must say,
John is getting really excited with that stick! Meanwhile, he is also,
inter alia, real McCoy jet qualified and owns his own real McCoy
Citation II jet [and a helo some say] so hey, I'm hardly poking fun!
Martha is also no stranger to the real McCoy. Serious mode: Read John's
piece some moons ago in "Flying' magazine about how some FAA ticket
types should 'not' be in the 'real' air but would be safer [for
themselves and us!] in a home bound desk sim!

Anyway, as for FS2004, so far, so good.

Doc Tony