At my wit's end... working LV 7.1.1 installation has failed

[Kevin_R]

I have a fairly robust laboratory automation application written in LV 7.1.1  that I had to move to a new workstation due to a catastrophic hard drive failure. It uses a mixture of NI-DAQmx, NI-VISA, Ni-MOTION, NI-GPIB, NI-SERIAL and DSC functions to control the instruments in question and coordinate with other applications running in the lab.

It *was* working last week, but we were having problems with NI-MAX crashing/hanging if it was run more than once after the workstation booted. I tried updating the software and NI-MAX started behaving, but now LabVIEW will not load the application.

Today I went so far as to uninstall all the NI software and drivers (rebooting after each stage) and start from scratch, installing LV 7.1, DSC 7.1, the various drivers, and then the LV7.1.1 patch. So far so good.

I then started the mass compile of the LabView 7.1  directory.

It stalls every single time with this showing in the mass compile progress box:

c:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 7.1\examples\analysis\daqmeas.llb\Data_Acquisition.vi

Loading                        7 Loaded

C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 7.1\vi.lib\lvdaq.dll

At this point, it even appears that the problem with NI-MAX may have returned, as well. I'm getting the "cannot connect to database..." error (which is why I have not listed all of my software versions while composing this post.

[Kevin_R]

Oops... forgot to mention that XP service pack 3 was recently applied to the machine in question. We're wondering if this might be the actual root of the problem

[Kevin_R]

OK, got NI-MAX up and running.

Here's my software environment:

• VI Compliance Package 2.1 2.1.2
•   LabVIEW 7.1
  •   Advanced Analysis
  •   Datalogging and Supervisory Control
•   LabVIEW DSC 7.1
•   LabVIEW Run-Time 7.0
•   LabVIEW Run-Time 7.1
•   LabVIEW Run-Time 8.0
•   LabVIEW Run-Time 8.2.1
•   LabWindows/CVI Run-Time 8.5.1
•   Measurement & Automation Explorer 4.5
•   Motion Assistant 2.1
•   NI Spy 2.6
•   NI-488.2 2.42
•   NI-DAQmx 7.2
•   NI-IMAQ 2.63
•   NI-Motion 7.5
•   NI-PAL 2.3
•   NI-Serial 3.4
•   NI-USI 1.0.2
•   NI-VISA Runtime 4.4.1
•   NI-VXI 3.3.1
  •   nivvglk.sys
  •   nivxint.dll
  •   nivvglu.dll
  •   cfgeng32.dll
  •   cfwgmxi2.dll
  •   cfwg1394.dll
  •   wmxi2ext.dll
  •   niini32.dll
  •   niresmanengine.dll
  •   resmanguivvgl.dll
  •   resman.exe
•   Traditional NI-DAQ 7.2

[Robbob]

I would definitely start with updated drivers....the newest daqmx version(8.8), supports labView 7.1.1, lets see where this takes us.

[Kevin_R]

NI-DAQmx 8.8 installed succesfully...

mass compile hangs in exactly the same place.

I do have the install disks to upgrade to the latest version of LabVIEW. We have hesitated to do so because there are 9 machines in this lab sharing data and status via the DSC and I didn't want to have to upgrade them all at the same time.

Can one machine running LV 8.x (and the corresponding DSC) interact successfully with  other machines running 7.1.1?

If so, we can upgrade this machine now to see if the problem goes away.

Any landmines to watch out for if we do upgrade? 

[Kevin_R]

One additional update... the actual process that appears to stall is explorer.exe, rather than LabVIEW. The only way to kill the stalled compiler is to kill explorer.   This is why I wondered if SP3 might have anything to do with it.

[Robbob]

Before you go through with the upgrade, lets try a quick workaround and see what happens:

Try manually opening the data_acquisition vi that the mass compile is hanging up on. See if there is an error opening it that mass compile may not be relaying to you.  If no errors are present, and after saving the vi to the newest version, the mass compilestill hangs, simply move the example to a different directory during the mass compile so that it is overlooked.

You shouldn't have to mass compile after upgrading 7.1 to 7.1.1...is there a reason you are doing this anyways?

[Kevin_R]

The instructions in the readme for the 7.1.1 upgrade specifically say that you need to recompile, with additional note that if you're using the DSC you need to ignore the automatic recompile messages and recompile everything in the LabVIEW 7.1 directory and below.

Something is definitely wierd in the file dialogs... when I first call Open VI it takes 20-30 seconds before the dialog will start responding to anything.

I'm trying to open the Data Acquisition vi now; the Controls palette started to appear but has never populated, and it appears to be stalled again.

Could a corrupted menu file cause this sort of problem? I recall in earlier versions of LV I'd have trouble getting LV to load if one of the .mnu files went bad. 

[Kevin_R · Accepted solution]

I started by compiling vi.lib and instr.lib, and then worked my way through the other subdirectories of ...\LabVIEW 7.1

I did hit a few vis in examples that wouldn't compile, but all the critical (to me)  things compiled.

I then was able to load my highest level vis and do a mass compile on user.lib (I've learned to load my top level vis before doing so, in case there are older copies of some of the subvis hiding in a subdirectory somewhere. It keeps them from being inadvertently swapped in as the subdirectories are traversed).

My application is up and running again and appears to be communicating happily with all the other system components via the DSC, and my NI-MAX installation is working properly, too.