Mode switch has gone back to the spam switch of BSOD
The MFD no longer displays the profile in use
Unplugging it causes BSOD
Plugging it in causes pc to slow down
All in all - it's a bit pants.
It's so odd. I'm seeing none of that, but have had other odd issues that others haven't seen. Having said that, I haven't been brave enough to disconnect the X52 since reading the other thread. It's possible I'd suffer the same disasters if I tried.
One thing I did do, many moons ago when I was
having problems using the stick with on-board USB2 ports that shared a controller with the USB3 ports, was to
install a third-party PCIe USB card (using a different chipset to the motherboard, just in case) and plug the X52 into that. So having the stick plugged into a port that's separated from the on-board chipset drivers might be helping to protect me from the worst of the problems people are seeing. But that's just speculation.
Saitek definitely seem to have a gift for writing drivers and support software that not only breaks under some circumstances, but often does so in a way that's unrecoverable and/or catastrophically bad for the current Windows session. I used to think Apple were the worst for that (iTunes handling of USB under Windows is atrocious) but Saitek has them beat hands down.
OT PS: I have to confess that for years I've been mentally reading your forum name as a single word ("ving-tet-un", like an Egyptian pharaoh or something). It was only when listening to the first of the most recent Lave Radio podcasts that I heard it read properly and the penny dropped. How embarrassing. I guess I just can't recognise gapless phrases that aren't in English. Amusingly, in the very next Lave Radio, Psykokow made the exact same mistake.