I have attached a VI that illustrates the basics of how to do this. I have also included, "at no extra charge" a copy of my timeout VI. This is simply a VI that waits for the tick count to reach the value of the intial tick count plus the timeout value (in milliseconds.) If you need to know how it works, I can give you a screenshot of it so you can reproduce it.
This VI does what you last described, except that the counter is displayed in MS, not in minutes (you'll have to do th conversion yourself.) Also, the VI quits LabVIEW after the timeout. You will want to modify this so that it uses VI Server to close the front panel.
In essence, you do place a parallel loop to countdown the time remaining before the event times out. You wi
ll have to connect the start of the timer (initial tick count) to the start of the event in some way. I encapsulated a copy of the tick count with the error handler, so that I could do just this, and I would suggest that you do the same, this helps in tying things together like this. In order to reset the counter, I simply wrote a new value to a variable I called "Timer" from the tick count each time an event occurred. In the timeout loop, I initially wrote the tick count to "Timer", and in the loop, I read the value of "Timer" and compare it to the current tick count to determine the delta T before timeout. When timeout occurs, the loop ends at the same time the event times out (just about).
By the way, thanks for the challenge. I have never used event structures before. It took me all of five minutes to code this up, another tribute to how great LabVIEW is (although I'll still grumble, moan, and complain about not being able to create compact executables until that's fixed.
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