PC with GigE Vision Adapter driver shuts down Networking often

[hihijk]

Hello, I am an IT Support guy here at JILA and we're having an interesting issue with a Vision setup. After an undetermined amount of time, networking on the Windows XP machine just "goes away".

When I go into Device Manager, I see under Network Devices "National Instruments GigE Vision Adapter", but it has the yellow exclamation mark on it. When I check its properties, I see "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)". There is no more internet access. You can disable/enable the network card and it comes back or you can restart the computer. The user of this setup hasn't said that there's anything in particular that he does that causes this, rather he just notices that the machine cannot connect to the network any longer.

When I look in Event Viewer, there tends to be two intriguing types of messages: Either "Information" regarding "nipalk" with broken pieces of information (such as "[nipalk] Notice: ZwLoadDriver(niimaqk) failed a...") as well as TCP/IP errors saying: "Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address 0030485591DD.  The following error occurred: The semaphore timeout period has expired. . Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP) server." The machine is attached on DHCP and I'm not sure if these errors are related, but I figure too much information is better than not enouch. 🙂

The version of the driver installed for the Vision Adapter is 1.1.1f7 and the computer has LabView 8.5. The computer DOES have an Intel gigabit adapter onboard a Supermicro X6DAL-XG motherboard. Any assistance in this matter would be most appreciated... it's frustrating to have his networking go down every few hours to every few days.

Thanks and please let me know if I can provide any further information.

[BlueCheese]

Hi Hihijk,

The yellow exclamation mark is usually an indication that the driver cannot load. I'm not sure why you would be getting the error randomly while Windows is running rather than once at bootup, unless something were causing the network to be disabled and re-enabled. In any case, I believe there was a known issue that was fixed that would rarely cause the driver to be unable to load on certain revisions of a particular Intel adapter. This should be fixed in our latest versions of Vision Acquisition.

I understand your frustration with it not working correctly. Since you are obviously familiar with installing drivers and this particular component is easily replaceable without affecting anything else, I put up a copy of the driver included with later versions of Vision Acquisition that includes a fix for the above issue. Again, the problem only affects a small subset of devices so I wouldn't advise anyone else to bother updating outside of a normal upgrade of Vision Acquisition, but given the specific nature of your problem I believe this should do the trick.  ftp://ftp.ni.com/outgoing/nigev112f6.zip.

Please let me know if this resolves your issue.

Thanks,

Eric