Did you know that X-Plane has a Safe Mode option?
If you hold down 
while clicking the X-Plane.exe start file, you get this screen (whether or not you crashed last flight):
This safe mode allows you to start X-Plane using the Default rendering options rather than your carefully tweaked rendering options. If you click the “Use Default Rendering Options” button, X-Plane will load using the default graphics settings.
Because safe mode does not change your rendering settings, the next time X-Plane starts, it will use your custom settings again.
On purpose of this “safe mode” is to help get X-Plane started if an add-on that changes X-Plane’s visual graphics settings causes a crash.
The other purpose is to allow you to compare your customized setting experiments with the default values.
Note this does not have any effect on the graphics driver settings you may have customized. Safe mode only affects the values set in X-Plane’s Settings –> Graphics page