After spending an hour trying to troubleshoot, and after spraying cleaner on the contacts and POTS, I didn't see any improvement.
Since I've had the Combatstick 568 since 2004 or so, I'm not disappointed or upset. It probably had thousands and thousands of hours on it over a decade's time, so I suppose it shouldn't be of any surprise that components were starting to fail... especially when it comes to a device with moving parts and multiple potentiometers.
Long story short, even though I truly believe I was having similar issues to other owners of the Combatstick, I got my money's worth and upgraded to a new CH Fighterstick... I should be back in action tomorrow or Friday.
Thanks.
I wound up buying a fighterstick also. I took the old combatstick apart and pulled the leads off the pots, cleaned them, replaced and recrimped. That took care of the issues with the pots but the hat was bad on that stick. I did the same with the new combatstick (good hat) and it was still a little twitchy. The new stick is much better although I had issues with keeping calibration at first. I removed the CH software and reinstalled, calibrated in CH software, left that program on, calibrated in AH....seems to be working over the past couple of weeks. Fingers crossed as when the stick works it works nicely. Unfortunately I now have no excuses....
Zaphod