I have noticed some anomalies in two of my EAW installs. In both 1.60 and 1.28E, my installs do the following:

1). The sounds revert back to what seems to be their volume upon original install. In other words, when I set them to my favoured volumes (I like to keep the engines down a bit, relative to the voices and effect sounds), my settings are gone the next time I start the game.

2). My force feedback always has to be set by me to realistic, upon starting the game. When I start the game the next time, it is always reverted to arcade.

Both these things occur even when I set my eawini to 'read only'.

Has anyone any suggestions? Is it specific to me or has anyone else this problem? If not, what might I be doing wrong?

By contrast, this does not seem to occur with VBH's FXEXE install.

Is the game writing a new eaw.ini file someplace? and using that.
Perhaps it depends where you have the game installed. If you have it in program files folder it might be writng a new one in the app data folder in windows.

Thats all I got , I can't remember if there where issue like that in 1.28e+above versions.
Its best to check the issue related to v1.2 as VBH may have corrected some of those problems in his build of the game.

Mark, I doubt if there's a false ini anywhere because the game recognises joystick and keyboard settings and also does so immediately and constantly when I change them. However, I'll have a search.

Okay. Sounds like you know what I was getting at.

Not sure why those settings (Volume is defaulting and FF is setting itself to Arcade).

Try v1.2 and put it through its paces. (let 1.2 make a new ini for itself before changing anything).

Best of Luck SkyHigh. Hope they can help ya.

Correction:

Making the ini read-only has stabilised the sounds, but the ffb continues to default to arcade. I'll try your suggestions later, but life is intervening for the next day or two.

Edit:

Did a quick install of 1.2, updated to 1.26. Works ok, ffb stays stable, not defaulting to arcade.

Placed a copy of this newly-generated ini into my 1.28 installation instead of the latter's version. The problem of defaulting to arcade recurs, even with a change to 'read only'.

The "eaw.ini" is updated every time you fly a mission, so making it "read-only" could cause a problem.

I cannot test force feedback code because I do not have a FF joystick, and I am not likely to get one.
I will have a look though to see if I can find anything relevant to arcade mode.

The problems I had with sounds seem to have been only of a temporary nature, perhaps somehow caused by my messing with ffb and the ini. The sounds seem to have settled now, allowing me to uncheck the read-only box in the eawini properties.

I have found a little file called simFFB which allows one to adjust the forces in an ffb joystick and I'm experimenting to find a nice balance in 'arcade', which is the constant default, and if I'm successful it will relieve me of the necessity of having to choose the 'realistic' option every time I start the game.

One thought: is it possible that, in the newly coded exe's, there is only one option for ffb, with no difference between 'arcade' and 'realistic', hence the default to the former? I can find little, if any, difference between the two. Apologies for the nit-picking. I recently invested in a MSSFFB2 joystick, specifically for EAW, as my other force-vibration stick doesn't give any worthwhile response. The Sidewinder works very well. I've combined it with a little stall-alarm mod, and both give excellent early warning of stalls and spins. I still crash good-oh!