Hi Mark,
Thanks for letting me know about this. Yes, I can see that the web page has a minimum limit of 1 observer but the Windows interface allows you to set it to 0.
I vaguely remember there being something strange with this and how FS works. I can't find my notes on this right now, but I just seem to remember something here. I did find a note saying that if you have a total limit (pilots + observers) that's less than 2, FS won't connect to the session because it thinks it's full. But I'm not sure if this observer thing is related to that, or if it's something else. FSHost hosts the session as an observer, but it's not technically "in the game" and doesn't increase the observers count. But maybe at one time it did, and that's why I had it set that way.
I've changed it to allow zero on the web page now also. But I need to test it to make sure everything still works ok. Unfortunately I don't have FS2002 installed right now, so I wonder if someone here on the beta team can test this a bit? What we'd need to do is set max pilots to something like 100 and max observers to 0. Then connect both FS2002 and FS2004, and try both pilot mode and observer mode in each and make sure you get the expected results when trying to connect (i.e. it should reject you when trying to connect as an observer). If you do test it, reply back here so we know. Thanks!
Russell