Keyboard entries update slowly in LabVIEW 6.1

[TimTower]

Often when I am working in LV, and enter a filename in the file open or save dialog box, keyboard characters display very slowly - about 1 Hz rate. For example, I might type "myfile.txt", which takes perhaps 1 sec to type, yet it takes 8-10 sec for the characters to appear in the box (one per second). This is frustrating. It only happens in LV 60 and 61 (not in 51 that I can remember). It happens on several different PCs, both with the development version and with LVRT.

Any ideas?

[JRA]

I have never actually heard of anything like this before. Could you maybe post a VI that exhibits this behavior so that I can run it on my machine? I'm running 6.1. This may give me an idea of what you're seeing.

[TimTower]

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Actually, I have discovered the reason, but I do not understand it.

By a process of elimination, I discovered which VIs were causing this behavior. Each was loading a dll used to talk to an I/O card. LV was making a call to the dll inside the VI (but the VI was not running when the slow typing occurred). When I removed this dll call, the problem went away.

Removing this dll call also solved another problem – LV61 would crash each time I click on Help / VI, Function & How-To help, even if no VIs were running. This problem is now fixed.

Beats me why these problems were related to the dll in question. I am able to use a different dll for talking to the I/O card so I am OK for now.

[JRA]

That's wild! I've never heard of anything like that happening before. At least you got it working. That's good news. Is it possible that the DLL could have been corrupt somehow? I saw you said it wasn't running at the time you were typing, but there has to be some reason this happened, but it beats me too? Best of luck with your application.

[Ben]

Shot in the dark.

DLL's that are not thread-safe will run in the user thread.

Ben