Hi Parny,
I would suggest using the newer distributed systems manager to check on the status of your variables. It is able to monitor everything being published by our shared variable engine:
https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/software-products/download.distributed-system-manager.html
(version should not matter--2010 just has bug fixes)
Another useful tool, if you have the DSC module, is the OPC quick client. It allows you to look directly at the opc tags published by labview.
The following documents discuss firewall ports you should try opening (obviously the best way to check would be to first just turn off your firewall completely, and if that resolves the issue start checking firewall settings):
https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA03q000000YIKqCAO&l=en-US
http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/8FB44A1162DE1B5F862574440072CF0B?OpenDocument
http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/F0DE7A1A88D92D6D86256D710049FB40?OpenDocument
That having been said, it looks like the server polling rate is working just fine, so lets go on the assumption that the firewall is not the problem.
Are these channels global (ie, built in MAX) or project channels? Check out this article on how to confirm that you are setting the channels up correctly. It was recently updated to 2010, but it should be relatively straightforward to convert back to 8.5.
https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA03q000000x2CMCAY&l=en-US
I would guess that you have seen this already, but it may be worth a look:
http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/F4346C03B087F01986256B9900730C01?OpenDocument
Finally, it is possible that the data is actually not being published. Go ahead and make a new project, make a new network-published shared variable, and then right click on the library and deploy that variable. Can you see that in the distributed systems manager (or server explorer)? What if you set up an analog/digital output channel and try to write a value to that channel? Does that succeed, or do you get an error?
Anyway, that should be a good solid list of things to try. Let me know if you have any interesting results.
Thanks,
