One of these days M$ is going to drive me past the limit. I swear, no other OS does this.

perfoptions.ini should by standard convention be in c:\program files\microsoft games\freelancer . Its not. In XP its in my documents->my games->freelancer. Probably the same place under different versions of windows.

If it isnt, bring up a DOS box and type "dir perfoptions.ini /s" while in the root directory. It'll take a while, but it will find the file if its on that drive.

The other M$ craziness that might be a problem is that windows hides extensions by default. Go into the folder options and find the advanced tab, somewhere there will be "hide extensions for known file types". Turn that off.