Using LabWindows 8 and the full runtime engine, I get a "Can not find RTE directory" error at rutime on some Windows PCs. PCs with the problem have it persistently, PCs without the problem never fail.Can not fine RTE directory

[jr_2005]

Presumably the user who attempted the failed installation was using an account that had administrator privileges on the PC at the time?

JR

[jlaney]

Hello,

Since you did not include versions of the DLLs I will have some trouble exactly determining what your issue is, but all of the DLLs listed in your reply are included in the CVI Run-Time engine.  What I suggest is for you to back up those files to something else, such as cvirte.dll.bak.  Then try running the application installation.  This should replace/update all of the DLL in the system folder and create the cvirte folder with the necessary files.

-Jeff
NI

[hlouck]

Deleting all "C:\WINNT\System32\cvi*.*" files seems to have cleared up the problem.

While this seems to have restored this PC to "normal" it leaves me wondering if this problem could occur again.  I don't know what caused it and we can't expect our customer to take such corrective action.

Unless someone has something to offer regarding how to avoid this in future, I'll simply thank you all for your help.

[jlaney]

Hello,

We have only seen this happen with people who have tried to clean their system manually after uninstallation.  This is not good, because we leak some files/registry keys on purpose of not breaking a future/past installations.  What I can surmise happened, is that someone uninstalled the application and then saw a cvirte folder inside of the system folder.  They then deleted it, not realizing that the runtime was leaked on the system on purpose, and that caused this issue to happen.

What is happening is that the entire runtime is versioned off a single DLL which controls all the others - cvirte.dll.  This dll was at the same or higher version on the system, so it thought that the runtime was already installed, and thus did not continue with the installation (this prevents the installation of an older version over a newer version). Deleteing the DLLs put your system into a clean state and allowed the Runtime installation to continue properly.

As a note, we used to leak the Runtime on purpose because CVI 5.0 and 5.5 installations had no way of reference counting and they leaked as well.  In the 8.0 timeframe we decided that it was no longer necessary to account for those older installations, and started removing the Runtime. The issue with this is that if you have ever had CVI 6, 7, or 7.1 on your machine, or a application that installs their runtime, then the runtime will always be leaked because the reference count is incremented by 2 on their installation.

-Jeff
NI

[hlouck]

That's very clear, thank you.

[PaoloB]

We had the same problem.

Deleting the cvi*.* files from the system directory worked fine ! Hope it will be the same for you.

We still do not understand why/how this happens.

Paolo