First, I'll address the floating style issue. Panels that are floating are ALWAYS on top. That includes always on top of your CVI source and project windows. This would be the same in any development environment where you are using floating windows. Floating windows are typically misused when the intent was a modal window which can be achieved with InstallPopup() instead of a floating window.
It also sounds like you have run into the behavior change that happened between CVI 5.0 and 5.5. CVI 5.5 and above are capable of building and debugging multithreaded programs. To do this we have to debug your program as a separate process (in CVI 5.0 and previous we debugged your program as a thread in the CVI environment). That means that when you suspend
your program, say with a breakpoint. The GUI for your program will not continue updating since the process is suspended and isn't refreshing it's windows. This is the same behavior you would see in Visual C++ or Borland C++, etc. It's a side effect of moving to an up-to-date debugging technology to support multithreaded debugging.
So to work around this problem, position your program's window where it will not be covered by the source or project window. This you can step through your program and see the updates on your GUI as you go.
Respond if you have questions,
Best Regards,
Chris Matthews
National Instruments
