Strange Characters Appearing in Control Text After Build -- Sometimes

[Doctor John]

I am reporting a rather strange phenomenon.  I am hoping that someone else has seen this and has an assignable cause.

I'm developing an application that after it is built:

1) The application works fine the first or second time (not too sure of the fidelity of this observation)

2) On subsequent executions, most characters in controls become "little boxes" on my machine.

3) My colleage working in Japan, experiences the same phenomenon with my code but the characters look like Chinese or Kanji to the western eye on his machine.  However, both Chinese and Japanese people have looked at these characters and can't make anything out.

4) If I simply build the application again, with no changes to the build spec, the problem is corrected. 

I've attached a JPG of a screen shot that was sent to me from my Japanese colleague.

Does anyone know what is going on here? 

Sincerely,

John

[TCPlomp]

Hello John

I'm not sure but I think you've used for these buttons a OS-native font (System font). But I can't see why it wouldn't replicate with each build. If I were you I'd change the OS-font within the OS and check if your app follows. If that's the case you should use not an OS font but hard code a font. (I guess you don't want to localize your app?)

Ton

[Charlie S.]

Hi John,

This does appear strange indeed! You might also want to check the .ini file associated with the executable. This is typically generated dynamically the first time the executable is run. If you rebuilt the application and re-installed it, you may have overwritten a *corrupt* file. If you come up with a way to reproduce this behavior or it happens again, please let us know.

Just an idea,

[Karl Rony]

I don't have to have a build for this problem to occur.  I have the problem in a Vista development environment. It started when I upgraded from 8.6 to 8.6.1.  Most of the time, the characters are in English. When they get weird, restarting LabVIEW tends to make the problem go away. Now, the problem is back and harder to go away. I'm having some success by bringing in older Vis that were created before the upgrade.

The problem followed the project when I loaded it on another Vista LabVIEW 8.6.1 computer. Enclosed is a small Vi that doesn't display correctly. I have not tried to see if this file shows up wrong on another machine here at work for fear of contaminating the other computer.

[falkpl]

I have seen this bug (very rarely) 3 times in 12 years or daily Labview uesage.  After a build some fonts get corrupted in some vis.  I am very avid about backing up so I can unroll the corruption.  The only I kept this from reoccuring was to delete my labview ini and then rebuild.  I spent some time with an internal NI engineer which sent me a tool for fixing the corrupted fonts.

It was not a simple font change but the display of some fonts (dialog or system were replaced with a chinese fint much like your problem).

I never validated this tool because rolling back my code and deleting the ini before rebuilding fixed the problem (although I lost all my settings and had to redo them)

[Karl Rony]

Paul,

Thanks for the response. I'm currently making lots of changes to optimize the code to reduce the processor utilization.  Every few changes, I'll close LabVIEW, reopen LabVIEW, check for strange characters, then backup the project.

I definitely have some corruption in the files. I have an instance of the project that I can start opening up VIs one at a time. Occasionally, I'll open a file that displays the strange characters. At this point, I'll close the project without saving and start all over, but skip the corrupted Vis. I have a handful that will display the strange characters.

A few months ago, when this first happened, I didn't find this forum threads and the NI support engineer didn't offer a repair tool. The engineer did help me get the problem to go away ... for several months.

Did you try and load the Vi? If so, did you see the strange characters?

[falkpl]

When this happened to me I was able to avoide it by deleting my labview master ini file then the problem went away.  I will check with the engineed if I can post the repair tool (it uses internal hiden properties or something of this nature).  As for the caus I never determined it.  When I posted a similar problem not much response so this is a very rare bug and is almost impossible to reproduce.

[Karl Rony]

I opened up a new ticket with NI. I deleted the LabVIEW.ini file as requested, but that didn't 'fix my problem. Instead of reloading LabVIEW, I loaded LabVIEW 8.6.1 from the 2009Q1 DVD on a different computer running WinXP Pro computer with US, FR, and DE languages. My corrupted project instance problems had problems on this other computer as well although the characters are now boxes.

Tonight, I may be able to try the project on a different Vista computer with LabVIEW 2009.

[falkpl]

Sorry my advice did not help.  For me deleting the ini prevented the corruption but did not fix previously corrupted files.  Do you have a contact info, I can forward you the fix I have.  I dont know how well the fix works and I dont know if I can post it here (I am checking on this) since it uses some internal code that might not be public.  I do know it is very hard to get any information on this issus (nothing posted online nor did most app engineers know about it).

[Karl Rony]

Unless NI offers a utility to fix all my Vis in this project, I should treat them all as corrupt and recreate the entire application on another computer or from printouts. I'll have to wait until the end of the project to try this. Until then, I hope for the best.