The symptoms you describe sound like you're pulling back too much.
A plane can only climb if it has enough speed to do so. If you're trying to climb too fast; you'll lose speed and eventualy the plane will stall and dive to regain enough speed.
Most planes in AH climb best at roughly around 180 MPH. Check your speed and make sure you're not any slower than this.
But to answer your question directly; all "customisation" in AH; such as stick and keyboard mapping; gun convergence; head positions and that sort of thing are in a folder in your aces high folder called "settings".
You can safely delete the whole folder (although you'll lose every thing in it); as AH will check fr it's presence when you start the program; and recreate it with default settings if it's not there.
