I am a private pilot with an instrument rating and one
of my primary uses for MSFS is practicing instrument
approaches. I like to set the cloud deck to the minimum
ceilings for that approach (e.g. 200 ft and 1/2 mile vis
for an ILS), plus winds etc, so I break out of the clouds
right at minimums or close to it.

On FS2002 this worked fine. However, when I 'upgraded'
to FS2004 I now find that the in-cloud visibility is much
too high. For example, if I set the ceilings to 200
feet overcast (8/8) as above, I may start seeing the
runway while I'm still as high as 1000 feet! And looking
out any view but the front of the plane is even worse.

I've tried about every combination of video settings I can
think of, to no avail. Increasing cloud texture to max,
reducing it to min, cutting terrain display to minimum etc.
Reducing visibility helps some, but not enough. Bearing in
mind that I don't care about outside graphics, just smooth
instrument and airplane response, any suggestions?

My setup:
AMD Athlon 650 w/ 128 mb RAM
geForce 2 video card (32 MB?)

TIA
--
Allen