no this is not it. the problem is during the installation process I get an error message saying "nilm.exe failed to initialize" and everytime I press the okay button an new identical error message pops up. after a reset Labview seems to execute fine however the OS is unstable. several instances of nilm.exe will execute (8 or 9)and sometimes it will eventually hog all the system resources with up to 200 instances of nilm.exe and lock up the machine. I found another thread in the disucssion forum with the exact same problem however I can't make this solution work for me.