Wow. So that was just a waste of nearly two hours. This morning (evening? 2AM?) I came down and installed some custom scenery and wanted to check it out. Booted up the sim…oh…ah…pretty scenery, but…the surrounding area was showing ortho, but no roads or buildings, just the painted on ortho.
Hmmm…now what did I do wrong here. I recently moved ALL of my scenery out of my custom scenery folder to troubleshoot some issues I was having with 11.30 beta crashing. I’ve been moving more stuff back into the scenery folder incrementally. All has been working fine so far. I pretty much have all my object libraries and custom airports back.
Well, this particular airport was in the PNW. I did have the Forkboy ortho for that area installed (after all, that was what I was seeing around the airfield). It took me an hour and a half of fiddling to realize that I was somehow missing my entire y_ortho4XP overlays folder. This folder contains all of the road and object data (where to put stuff) on top of the ortho. Somehow, in my moving files around, I had dropped it in an object folder where it was conveniently hidden and would not load. I finally got smart enough to figure out what was missing, did a Windows search, and found the directory and moved it to the proper place. Problem solved.
I hate it when it takes me hours to correct something I should have been able to diagnose and fix in 30 seconds.