Its been a long while for me playing with CFS2...
You certainly need any aircraft you want to appear either as wingmen or enemies to be in the QC list but I can`t remember if you can change aircraft during QC to select an aircraft for yourself from the general aircraft list (and I haven`t currently got CFS2 installed so I can check)

I don`t remember any great problems or clever tweaks for QC from the past. You do need to keep your total number of CFS2 aircraft under the "100-ish" limit to avoid problems starting missions/qc/freeflight but this doesn`t sound like that problem

Thx Martin.. I 'think' the new graphics cards and drivers have passed up this old code and they don't know quite what to do with all that old stuff.. just my opinion. I have to run a screen res at a min of 1200x1600 with this monitor.. unheard of back in 2000.. When I'm in panel view my fps are down to about 10.. Go out of panel view and they are back up to 80-100fps.
Anyway pretty soon I'll put all this on a dvd and let some archeologist find it one day lol.
Thanks