John,
When I suggested to update them manually, I meant the following:
1) Open Measurements and Automation Explorer
2) Expand the tree to My System->IVI Drivers->Driver Sessions, and select your Driver Session.
3) Go to the Hardware tab. In the Hardware Assets table, change the name of the Resource Descriptor to match the device name (as displayed in the Devices and Interfaces tree).
4) Click Save IVI Configuration
To answer your question of how the data is saved, all IVI data is saved in the IVI Configuration Store file, which is an xml file. Those can be exported, imported, etc. by selecting IVI Drivers and using the buttons at the top of the tab (Save IVI Configuration, Open IVI Configuration, Save IVI Configuration As...).
The data in Devices and Interfaces (as well as Data Neighborhood and Scales) containing information about your National Instruments devices is saved separately. You can save backups of that and import configurations by using File->Export and File->Import, respectively.
When using the NI drivers (NI-DMM in this instance), the device name is used as a lookup in a table, then a session is opened to the device. As for whether or not this could be a cleanup issue, the error you saw at Self-Test does not appear to be due to that. If a session were still open to a device when you try to open a new session to it, you would receive a Session In Use error.
My thought at this point is that the device name and the Driver Session and/or Logical Name were named DMM, and so Self Test and the Initialize call in the Soft Front Panel did not know which to use, and they found the IVI Logical Name or Driver Session instead of the device.
Hopefully that helps clarify things.
Please let us know if you have any further questions.
Thank you!
Tobias G
Software Engineer
DMMs and Power Supplies/SMUs
National Instruments
Tobias
Principal Software Engineer
Driver Software
National Instruments
