XP and generated e-mail reports

[kilowatt]

We are running an executable created in Labview 6.1. The application generates an e-mail report when it sees an event that exceeds preset points in the value it is monitoring, in this case the frequency of the utility grid. I admit I know little about the application itself; it uses a 6023E DAQ card to obtain its input and uses the Labview 6.1 runtime engine to operate. Anyway on to the problem, up to recently, we had operated the application on a PC running Windows 2000. We had a system crash and decided to upgrade to Windows XP. We have just restored the machine to service and I used the 6.9.3 DAQ driver and Labview Runtime engine 6.1 to try to stay with the same vintage as the executable. Since the restore the application has not been able to send out any e-mail. I assume this is some issue with XP, but I am not sure. The XP installed is XP Pro with the latest service packs installed. Any idea's what we can try, or what additional information do you need.

[AESulzer]

You will first need to break the system down into it components to see where the failure is occurring. The first thing to check is whether your DAQ card is returning the appropriate data. You can check this by opening up Measurement & Automation Explorer and testing the hardware there.

If the hardware is working okay, then you will need to dig into the software to find the problem, and to do that you will need to open the VI in the LabVIEW development environment. First make sure that you are using proper error reporting in order to catch any errors that may give you clues to the breakdown. After that, you will need to use probes, breakpoints, and execution stepping to pinpoint exactly where in the program things start going awry. Once you've narrowed it down to a specific place, it will be much easier to troubleshoot. Fill us in with what you find out!

Regards,

[kilowatt]

Since we do not have Labview, only the executable, the internal examination of the process was out of our reach. However we were able to figure out it was going through the process up the point of trying to send the e-mail since it was creating the .jpg image and writing it to the hard drive that it sends as an attachment to the e-mail report. We came to the conclusion something with the new setup was keeping the application from shaking hands with our SMTP mail server. The answer proved to be something unexpected. When IT upgraded the operating system they also decided to update the anti-virus software. Unknown to us this new version of MacAfee Enterprise has a mass mailing worm blocker. It has a white list of known e-mail clients that it will allow to send mail, so when we tested with a regular mail client all appeared to be well. However the Labview application was NOT in the white list and was blocked from sending any mail. The MacAfee program proved quite resistant to allowing us to add the Labview application to the white list and we finally had to disable that feature completely.