Bug in palette saving in LV 8.5 on Vista?

[Mads]

If I edit a palette in LV 8.5 on Vista the paths to VIs I've added to the palette (or .llbs) seem to become invalid the minute I save them.

Let's say e.g. that I add the old style serial port init.vi from c:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5\vi.lib\Instr\serial.llb\Serial Port Init.vi to the palette I get a missing VI icon in the palette after it has been saved. If I go back into palette edit mode and choose to display the path the menu has stored it is:

C:\Users\Mads\Documents\LabVIEW Data\8.5\Palettes\vi.lib\Instr\serial.llb\Serial Port Init.vi

In other words - it seems that LabVIEW does not handle the fact that on Vista the menu is saved in my user folder.

I fell like I'm doing everything the way it feels right to do it so is this a bug, or what's the correct way of doing this? If it is a bug, is there a good workaround (other than to drop the VIs in the user.lib folder)?

[Noel]

Hey Mads,

On both XP and Vista, I successfully used the Palette Editor to place the Serial Port Init.vi on an existing LabVIEW palette.   The VI did not disappear after exiting the Palette Editor and when I relaunched the Palette Editor, the path to the VI was not incorrectly listed as being under my documents directory hierarchy but rather under Program Files in LabVIEW's vi.lib directory.

So, we need to figure out where we are differring in our steps to reproduce the problem.  Below are a few questions to help figure this out.

a)  Which LabVIEW palette are you attempting to put the Serial Port Init.vi?   I put it on the Programming palette.

b)  If you modify a LabVIEW palette, the editor saves a mirror file of the modified palette into your Documents directory hierarchy.  E.g., <user documents>/LabVIEW Data/8.5/Palettes/menus/categories/programming/dir.mnu.     Was such a palette menu file created on your system?   If so, can you post this file?  If not, was any file saved into the Palettes directory under your documents directory hierarchy?

c)  Have you disabled UAC on Vista?  Did you launch LV as a standard user or administrator?

Thanks a billion,

Noel Adorno 

[Mads]

Hi Noel,

I've been busy with other stuff, but I took another look at this now and it's a kind of funny problem: it is limited to the addition of that particular llb at that particular location(vi.lib\Instr\serial.llb). I can put other llbs into that folder and add them without any problems, and I can copy the serial.llb to e.g. the desktop and add it with no problem(so it's not the file itself!). It just does not like the serial.llb when it is in vi.lib\Instr.

[Albert.Geven]

Hi Noel and Mads

We have a similar problem here with specific llb's that are destroyed by editing them in 8.5.
NOT vista, plain xp
It looks like some older .llb files are not completely compatible for this editor !
I try to find a way to reproduce this. Maybe the palette editor can be made open source so we can actually look what happens, and try to make it a bit more user friendly.

(it probably are .llb files originating from labview 7.0 or 6.1 that have the problem, each version is recompiled but I doubt that affects the menu)
 

[Øyvind Ø]

This was reported to R&D (# 4EE3HHQH) for further investigation.

Thanks for the feedback!

Øyvind Ø.

AE

National Instruments