LabVIEW 2014 hangs during editing

[LV_Pro]

I am trying to recover from a drive failure on my Windows 7 installation. Unfortunately, as the laptop is 5 years old and I have travelled a lot in that time period, I am restoring the machine piece meal, for instance I was at Windows 7 Ultimate am now using the original Windows 7 Home Premium as the activation number was on the computer (the Ultimate wasn't). I have reinstalled LabVIEW 2011SP1, 2012SP1 and 2014SP1, I also have NI DAQmx 14.5.1a nd MAX 15.0.

What is happening, and it doesn't appear to happen in LabVIEW 2012, is that while trying to edit in LabVIEW 2014 I will click on "something" (trying to open a vi, trying to click on a control, etc.) and I will get the "busy circle", or sometimes the VI that is open in the foreground (the active one) will either close or another vi FP will pop to the front. I have, a couple of times, had  the windows Task Manager and Resource monitor open and occasionally they RM will indicated that "LabVIEW not responding". Of course this all has happened as I am trying to finish two critical projects, which due to the system crash/restore time are already behind. I will say they that In the LabVIEW 2014 install I have almost all of the toolkits installed (which I didn't before the crash). I will probably uninstall most, before I hear from any of you, but this is really ruining my day!

Thanks,

[Bob_Schor]

Putnam,

     I've had a slew of faulty installs, particularly when installing "on top of" previous installations.,  In the past year or two, I've resorted to doing Repairs (instead of uninstall/reinstall), and have had a lot of luck.  Something that you should look at is whether your latest install "killed" a Service that LabVIEW needs.  In an earlier post today (here), I listed the Services that I currently have running on my system (which has LabVIEW with the Real Time and Vision Toolkits installed) -- if you seem to be missing some that you think belong, try the Repair option (I'd start with the most recent LabVIEW you installed -- try repairing just LabVIEW first, but be sure to have your distribution media available).

Bob Schor

[LV_Pro]

Well, I attempted a repair, really a pain as it asks for the location of various parts, and unless you are good at guessing you can spend a lot of time putting the various install DVD's in. Ultimately it didn't help 😞   But in doing it, and looking in Windows' "Programs and Features",  in noiticed the NVidia driver that the repair shop installed when my laptop crashed, the latest and greatest. I remembered that shortly after I purchased this laptop (5 years ago?) there was discussion on the Toshiba forum that apparently the Toshiba version of the NVidia drivers was tweeked for these machines, that other, newer versions, were unstable. I downloaded the driver from 2010 (after a couple of other attempts) and it appears to have helped. We'll see (pardon the pun).

A long night, now at the not too happy customer, after an 1 1/2 hr. drive. Yawn! Who needs sleep, we'll have enough when we die!

[LV_Pro]

Well after a number of hours editing code it appears that reverting to an older, stable, video driver has resolved this issue <touch wood!>

It is amazing how annoying these issues can be, particularly when you are way behind a deadline and trying to catch up. Customer says to me "when I worked for a software company the developers got new machines every three years". Of course that company probably had an IT department that could order and configure the new machines, but with my company, I"m it (or IT!)

Back to it, hope I haven't jinxed my self.

[LV_Pro]

I was wrong and now it is really driving me crazy. In researching this I found it seems to be a known issue, for quite some time

Windows 7 shows "Not Responding"     With the Workaround: Wait until the expensive task as finished before trying to interact with the window

Which is no workaround as it happens when I click on almost anything now. Then I have to hunt for the window, which seems to always move to behind all the others.    Really making my stress levels climb!

[LV_Pro]

Has anyone any thoughts on this? It looks like the description in the known issues, but happens when I do almost anything while I have my main vi open, even if minimized. It has a fair number of controls on its front panel, but as yet not much on the block diagram, other than the beginnings of an event structure. It is really making it hard to be productive, and I do need something to show the customer.   The suggestion about waiting is irrelevant, I can have everything sitting there, then click on a vi's toolbar to go the diagram and nothing happens, then after a few seconds I get the "busy swirly", the message (not reponding) shows in the title bar and bam, it is now somewhere behind the others. Has anyone found a setting that helps this?

[Bob_Schor]

I have, occasionally, had LabVIEW (don't know which version -- I am mostly using 2012 (slowly moving away from this), 2014 SP1 (main "production" work), and 2015 (planning to standardize here).  When I've seen it, the wait was usually <30 seconds, I exited LabVIEW and restarted.  I didn't usually reboot ...

Bob Schor

... which means you might be crazy, but this problem isn't proof of that ...

[LV_Pro]

Those close to me would say I'm not being driven crazy, that it is a short putt.

[LV_Pro]

Ok, the problem seemed to have receded, but is back with a vengance. 256141 — Windows 7 often shows "(Not Responding)" and will bring other windows to the front during e...

The "work around" is a flippant "wait until the expensive operation completes" noting that the vi you are working on may disappear behind others. Well, this isn't a work around when it happens several times a minute. I do have a question to the NI folks, is this seen with all versions of Windows 7? I don't remember this behavior before my recent system crash and restore and it occured to me this morning that I was using Window 7 Ultimate 64bit prior, now am using the Windows high end Home (the one who's license number was on the machine, still looking for my Ultimate upgrade info).

[danniwithNI]

Hi Putnam,

As far as we know, Windows 7 version should not affect LabVIEW performance. R&D is working on this known issue and it seems that Windows 7 seems to aggressively mark windows as "not responding", but in the mean time I would recommend looking through your project to see if there are any measures you can take to improve their performance. If your projects and VIs are large or complex, or if you have overlapping indicators in your UI, it might be the likely cause for LabVIEW to hang several times a minute, but if you find this not to be the case I would try testing if LabVIEW hangs in a simple VI. Please let me know if this is the case, and I can work with you further to determine the source of the error.