Hello,
I've recently bough a Saitek X52 joystick and was trying to make it work with I-war. I get a very weird problem where my lateral thruster mode is always activated so I can't really control my ship. I'm not pressing S at all.
This is an issue with the joystick, I think, not the game, but I thought that maybe someone around here also uses an X52 with I-War. If so, how have you configured your profile? Did you also have this problem?
Is there any way to change key bindings in I-war?
Thanks a lot!
-belgerog
EDIT: Actually I've noticed that whenever I touch any slider in the throttle handle lateral thrusters are activated.

Have a look at psg\resource\keybind.ini
I've not played with it myself, but it may facilitate the changes you need.

Got the same problem with my X52 pro. Makes the game unplayable because as soon as you enter a mission you start accelerating in one way and there doesn't seem to be much you can do about it.
I've tried setting huge deadzones for the precision slider and the rotaries on the throttle, but that doesn't seem to do much really as the lateral thrusters get fired randomly by just using the throttle itself.
Also the game seems to be stuck in free mode for the thrusters, as it ignores whatever speed you set with the '+' or '-' key, and pressing 'n' to switch to assisted mode doesn't work, even though the icon for this in the cockpit does change.
Switching the controls to keyboard in the game options also doesn't help, as apparently this only disables input from the x, y and z axis from the stick, but leaves the throttle fully enabled and as such still leaves you with wonky lateral thrusters.
So far the only option I've found that makes the game playable for me is to completely remove the joystick in windows itself. Seems that as long as the game detects the joystick it just refuses to let you control anything thruster-related with the standard keyboard controls.
Really weird stuff.
That only has the keyboard bindings as far as I can see. The joystick binds appear to be hardcoded.

Is the joystick hat set to lateral thrusters in the options? If so change it to contact mode instead.

Thanks for the answers! Hamsfarthing explained the problem more precisely than I could (I have exactly the same thing). I'm afraid I haven't been able to do much editing the keys.
What OS are you running, Hamsfarthing? Someone told me his I-War was working fine with the X52 with no special configurations, but he was using Win 7. I'm running Vista.
EDIT: Ravenger, I tried looking into that but it was already in contact mode. I think that's just for the joystick hat. At least in my case, the problem arises whenever I move the throttle handle. Thanks anyways!
As of now, as long as I don't touch my throttle handle and keep it at 50%, I can pilot the ship normally, using + and - on the keyboard for throttle. Before the strange movements where happening anyways. I'm not exactly sure what caused this improvement, but I did set large deadzones for the throttle slider/wheels, but that didn't seem to work for Hamsfarthing.

I've tried it on Vista and XP, but get the same result on both. Can't try win 7 as I don't have it.
Also tried some different X52 driver versions, but no luck there either.
If only the keyboard commands for the thrusters would work properly for me when the joystick is installed, then I could manage. I can live without using the throttle, but playing a space sim without using a stick (what I'm reduced to now) feels just way too wrong to me.

If you can leave the throttle alone, then you can use the A and Z thruster override keys to control the ship's speed. That was the preferred way to manage the ship's speed by the dev team, but then we were generally using stand-alone joysticks, not separate joysticks and throttle controllers.
However it's a shame to have that lovely throttle controller there, but not being able to use it. I remember playing the game with a CH products Pro Throttle and F16 stick, with rudder pedals, and it was amazing.
I've just gone through all my old support emails from my Particle Systems days (I have a backup of my Particle Systems email) and I found an email from someone with a Gravis Exterminator with the same problem. Unfortunately I don't have any corresponding solution in my emails :-(
It could be some sort of problem with the control enumeration - possibly the X52 has too many controls for the game to enumerate properly. The game was designed for DirectX 7 originally.

If you set your throttle to 50%, and leave it there, doesn't it work that way?
Also, besides setting deadzones for my throttle wheels and sliders, I created a specific profile in SST. Try going to the wheels and sliders in the profile editor, click on the little arrow on the box, select "bands". Then modify your bands so that the center band occupies the whole area (0-100%). Don't forget to do this for every possible sliders, as many of them are assigned, for some reason, to change lateral thrusters. I'm not sure if that's what makes it (partially) work in my case, but I can't think of any other significant changes I made. I've been able to play with stick and keyboard.
There must be a easier way to fully disable each throttle button in a profile, though.
EDIT: Ravenger, thanks a lot for all the research!

If I set the throttle and everything on it in a perfectly neutral position and use huge deadzones I can indeed get any and all of the thrusters to stop firing randomly. But like I said before, that's not really my worst problem.
As long as the X52 is installed in windows, both the A and Z thruster override keys and the + and - speed set keys simply refuse to do anything until I remove the X52 drivers through the device manager in windows. As soon as I do that they start responding normally. Rather maddening really.
Don't want to uninstall the X52 every time I want to play iwar, and then reinstall whenever I want to play some other space or flight sim.
Wish modern PCs still had gameports. Then I'd simply dig up my old MS Sidewinder stick and use that for the game.

Just tested an old PCI soundcard with my Sidewinder 3D Pro, Microsoft doesn't support gameport on Vista/7 64 bit :(
So I have two diferent joysticks, X52 Pro and Microsoft's Sidewinder, and none of them work with I-War. I'm currently playing with my XBox 360 pad.
Is there an option to config or just disable axis on I-War?

The only axis you can disable as far as I know is the rudder, using the -norudder command line argument. You have to use that on the iwar.exe file, so you may have to run that directly. However running iwar.exe directly may not work due to the way that GOG have fixed the game to run on modern PCs.

I've got this problem too, using X45 and Vista 64. I'll install the game and stick to my old machine (XP on that) and see if the problem persists. I vaguely recall that combo having worked fine, but I'm not entirely sure. Might be confusing it with an even earlier machine and X36 (neither of which I have available anymore).
Incidentally, this is why I hate it when games don't let you completely remap the controls. If IW had a similar in-game configuration tool as Freespace 2 for example, trouble like this could probably be sorted out easily enough. But as it is, the half-assed in-game config doesn't let you do anything useful, and the problem is screwed-up enough that you can't satisfyingly solve it with the stick's programming software either. Grmbl.
EDIT: Well, tried the game and stick on XP. The game took no input from the joystick at all, even though windows detected the stick correctly and it worked just fine in other games. No amount of fiddling with compatibility modes or the compatibility administrator changed this.

I have an X52 as well, and as you say if you leave it in the neutral position you can play with the keyboard and the stick. Don't have the same problem with using A,Z+ and - though, those work perfectly.

After a pretty lengthy workaround I basically got nearly full functionality out of my X52.
All it took was using PPJoy to create a virtual joystick, making said joystick the preferred device in windows, then using PPJoyjoy to map the X52's buttons and axes to those of the virtual one and voila.
Of course that's the short version, it took me quite a bit more fiddling to get it all working. But now I've got use out of everything except the 2 rotaries, the slider and the mouse stuff on the throttle.