Hi all, with ch-hangar down this forum is linked off CH Products so figure i'll post this here to help anyone else out.

On my system, I recently resolved an issue where CH Manager was ultra flaky. Meaning, none of my mapped configs were working. The issue essentially went like this.

1) Fresh boot, load CH Manager, verify all stick axis' and buttons are working registered in the GUI.
2) Click the download button to load profile and this is where the issue happened.

50% of the time or more the download button would then go away, i could still see it but it wasn't colored and couldn't be clicked again. Worse than that, all stick input went away. I could resolve this and get it to work by manually deleting all the USB devices and rebooting. Sometimes it would then work, sometimes I had to do this a few times. At some point, I put all the CH gear on a single USB 2.0 4 port hub so i could more easily disconnect/reconnect them all. This is what got me on the right track.

My system is based on the Asus Z97-a/USB 3.1 motherboard. ALL USB ports on this motherboard are USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 and that seems to be the main problem. Using the USB 2.0 hub plugged into a USB 3.0 port improved stability however, I still had frequent issues where the CH Manager mapped profiles just wouldn't work. Do note, if i did NOT use the CH manager software, and did NOT download a profile, all 3 CH devices worked fine, they just weren't one logical device and I couldn't use any of the goodness of the software.

TLDR:
I ultimately solved the problem by way of a dedicated USB 2.0 PCI card - $10 off amazon. Since installing this add-in card the CH Manager profiles have been flawless. I'm not 100% sure a PCI-E USB 2.0 card will work, I couldn't find any reasonably priced though and I have 1 PCI slot on this mobo, so, I mean why not.

I also run Razer Synapse software which has virtual device tech as well as a steam controller. I didn't bother removing these to isolate the issue but its not impossible that these devices/softwares didn't add to the issue. Another odd thing, if I didn't overclock my CPU, CH manager worked fine. Why? IDK and didn't bother troubleshooting further since my problem is resolved with a simple PCI card. The strange thing, I don't overclock via the system bus at all, im 100% multiplier overclock so in theory, nothing should be strange at the bus level. Timings there should be default. Yet, for some reason, OCn is part of the strange issue.

Hope my recent struggle helps someone in the future. A $10 PCI card is way better than a few hundred for an all new HOTAS from someone else though - and I was close to switching to another vendor after over a decade with my CH stuff. Glad I didn't as I love me some CH Products.

*edit* built a new PC recently (late 2023) and am getting back into flight sims. Turns out a PCIe USB 2.0 card works as well as a PCI USB 2.0 card.

thebaronofsd