Experiences installing LV 2017 or greater with existing LV installations...

[Bob_Schor]

@57005:

I feel your pain!  I (unfortunately) didn't review my own post on safely removing LabVIEW 2018, and (slightly) messed up Step #3, removing NIPM itself.  After removing everything except NIPM by selecting "National Instruments" in Programs and Features, I saw only NIPM in the list, greyed out, with "Remove" also greyed out (well, "pinked" out), but with the possibility of updating it to Version 18.5.1.  I did, then realized I needed to run NIPM to remove NIPM ...  Oh, well, at least I got all NI Software off before I left work -- will reinstall LabVIEW 2016 on Monday, and keep LabVIEW 2018 in a VM (where it belongs).

Bob Schor

[EricR]

Good evening Bob (and others already on this thread).

A few things to consider in this thread:

1. For the most part, LabVIEW installs "side-by-side" meaning that new versions install to a new directory, and don't directly interact with other versions of LabVIEW already installed.
2. There are MANY "shared" components in the NI family of software, that LabVIEW depends on for specific functionality.  Those shared components are often NOT installed side-by-side as the OS may require that only one version of a driver be installed, or other similar OS restrictions.  For those components, during the install of a new version of LabVIEW, the services in those components must be stopped, the old versions of the drivers removed, and the new versions installed.
3. In 99% of the cases, the installers do the right things and your system is left in a good state after the install.  As an example, my laptop typically has at least 4 versions of LabVIEW on it and right now I have 5 (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and the beta for an unreleased future version).  My laptop works great with my applications and with the hardware I need to interact with.
4. In the specific scenario Bob is pointing out, one of the services either hasn't stopped correctly, or didn't get removed/replaced correctly.  Typically there would be indicators in the install log as to why that we could debug.  I'm in the process right now of trying to get a good reproducing system from Bob installed to a computer here at NI so we can figure out why this scenario has been such a sticking point.
5. If anyone else has seen this same issue where the "NI Network Discovery" component fails to install or gives any error related to it, I would love to hear from you.  Please contact me at: eric.reffett@ni.com
6. The issue identified with the SNs not being known for some of the components during the upgrade is also new to me.  If you have any screenshots or log files from this, please also send those to me so we can identify the issues and resolve them.