Ok I actually KNOW what happened and have retraced my steps but I still do not understand it :(
I was perusing the mods section here and found the True Blue cockpit and decided to give it a whirl. Conscience as I am of having a backout plan I verified the files that were going to be changed and made copies. As far as I could see it was only files in the cockpit and liveries directories so I backed those up.
Didn't care for it as much as I thought so decided to go back, removed the directories and put the originals back in place. Piece of cake...until I fire up the game again and see performance is hideous, FPS in the single digits. Completely unplayable. At first I didnt think of the mod so I exited to make sure there was not something chomping up CPU or anything which I did not find. Fired it up again, same thing.
Hmmm, reboot. Fresh start. Still unplayable, tried several missions. (BTW I have a low spec system so everything is already set to low, it was very playable before today)
Since the only thing I changed was those directories I wondered if maybe something else got horked, so I installed DCS world again. Went really quick, probably because most of the files are already there. No luck. Ok, uninstall, removed all traces that I could find of DCS world) and start from scratch.
Same thing.
I have no idea what happened here or how to fix it, as far as I am concerned the mod I tried to use has nothing to do with any of this but I just can't seem to get this back to a playable state.
Other than re-installing, running CC cleaner on registry files, removing the directories and starting over what else can I do?