Bug Report: Labview 7.x Win2k Help on Polymorphic VI's

[Alex!]

When I use help on a Windows 2000 Computer, running Labview 7.0, to look up information on any polymorphic VI (such as the DAQ-mx VI's) things slow to a crawl. Help flashes periodically, a couple of times per second, evidently refreshing. I try to click the pull-down menu to select a topic, but the wonkiness (the computer nearly hangs) keeps me from selecting an option. If I click the pull-down menu, but don't select an option, it wraps up automatically when Help does one of its periodic refreshes.

I'm getting the vibe that Help is refreshing rapidly, trying to poll the pull-down menu, but something in the implementation is mangled.

[Brett_B.]

Is it only on certain VIs? If you can give me an example of a couple I can try to reproduce it on this end. In the meantime, someone with your exact setup may be able to confirm/deny this activity.

-Brett

[Alex!]

This is only on polymorphic VI's. I think that the cause of the problem has to do with the pull-down menu to select an instance of the VI in Help. This pull-down menu only appears for VI's that have many instances; specifically, DAQmx VI's. If you want to try to reproduce the bug, try looking at Help on:

DAQmx Create Virtual Channel.vi
DAQmx Read.vi
DAQmx Trigger.vi

You should see a pull-down menu in the top-right frame.

The sticky thing, for me, is that the pull-down menu doesn't respond properly. The window flashes periodically (several times per second, at first, then it slows down). Whenever it flashes, the pull-down menu wraps up again, making it difficult to select an entry.

This error has been observed on 2 PXI systems running Windows 2000 and a PC laptop running Windows XP. All were using LabView 7.1.

Thanks for looking into this for me!

[Alex!]

Has anyone else noticed this behavior? It's really annoying.

-Alex

[Brett_B.]

Hey Alex,

I was able to assemble a test machine to replicate this...but did not see the issue. As I was building the machine and installing the software it occured to me that your version of DAQ may have something to do with this issue as the help files, VIs, and drivers are all loaded with the NI-DAQ install and not the LV install. Which version of NI-DAQ do you have? I have used NI-DAQ 7.3 with LabVIEW 7.0 on Win2k and did not see the issue.

let me know,
-Brett