Labview 8.0.1 hangs on startup and shutdown

[tadk]

I have been using Labview 8.0.1 and Teststand 3.5 on my laptop for a few weeks (eval versions)
during the time I don't have access to my PXI platform.
Today when I tried to shutdown my laptop, Labview would not shut down and could
not be terminated. After 10min or so it finally shut down. After reboot of the system, labview
hangs on startup during "finishing intialization", and must be terminated. I cannot launch it at all.
Please tell me there is a way to fix it without reinstall.

[tadk]

Additional info: When I shut down my machine, it takes a few minutes even if I have not run any apps at all - just power on and then shutdown. Before I installed all this NI stuff, it would take seconds to shutdown. I can see there are 5 or 6 NI agents running right from boot. Even if you aren't planning to use labview, they have already consumed a good sized chunk of memory. 

[tadk]

OK, deleting the ini file did not solve the problem. I tried a repair on the labview component and it seemed to complete, and then it tried a repair on Ni-DAQ 8.0.1 even though I had not requested that. This hangs up at "shutting down services".

Since its not repairable, I tried removing all components with DAQ in the name. This also hangs while trying to remove NI-DAQmx 8.0, and even though it does not give details, I suspect it is trying to shut down those same services. You cannot cancel out of the remove procedure unless you terminate just about every running process.

Later  I found that nipalsm (2 instances) and nimxs are processes which cannot be terminated in task manager. Somehow they do get terminated in a normal shutdown, but I have not seen one of those in a while.

Next step: installing over the exising  Ni-DAQ.

[Ankita]

Hi,

I would suggest that you either call/email National Instruments after creating a  service request at www.ni.com/ask. We might be able to help you in cleaning your system.

Regards,

Ankita Agarwal

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

Message Edited by Ankita on 05-12-2006 05:05 PM

[tadk]

Tech support suggested a few options the first being delete the ini file, reboot, launch labview and give it up to an hour to sort things out.This didn't work.
Option 2 is the repair, which didn't work because windows couldn't shut down the running NI agents.
Option 3 is uninstall, delete Labview folders, reinstall, which was also failing for the above reason.

My solution was to identify those problem NI agents that were running (40MB worth!), rename those exe files so they could not re-launch, reboot and uninstall everything.
I think my problem may have been due to the scattered  way I did my original install. I had downloaded the various pieces at different times but I think there were
some 8.0.1 mixed with 8.0 and probably not installed in any particular order.

I have now reinstalled from the non-eval 8.0 CDs and I plan to avoid 8.0.1 if possible. Hopefully this will prevent the problem recurring since the fix takes 1-2hrs.
It is promising that my shutdown time is only 30secs or so instead of minutes.

These are the obvious NI agents which run from boot. There may be others with less obvious names:
nidevmon.exe, nipasm.exe(1), nipalsm.exe(2), nisvcloc.exe, nidmsrv.exe, nimxs.exe

I can understand one such program may be needed to launch others as needed, but six!?
Programs which launch and run without your request, using resources and providing no benefit are often called parasite programs.

[tadk]

I have had a repeat of this scenario under Labview 8.0. I was editing the "simple operator interface" example which comes on the course work CD. I experienced several lockup situations where apparently labview did not like my added wiring, and the only recourse was to use task manager to shut down labview. After continuing at this for a couple of hours I reached a point where even task manager did not come up. A hard reboot brought my system back but labview never gets past "finishing initialization".

I tried the repair and deleting the ini - no change. The only fix I know is a reinstall.  Other advise is welcome.

During this short project I have had to reboot my system at least 70 times to get past some kind of lockup or flakey behavior, I have seen at least 15 spontaneous reboots caused by a VI, and I have had to reinstall twice on my laptop and twice on the target chassis.

When is Labview 9.0 expected?

[Travis_M.]

Woah there!  Let’s take a step back before we take drastic measures…..

First of all, does your Laptop meet all of the minimum requirements of the install of LabVIEW?  Do you have sufficient RAM, do you have a supported OS, and do you have a capable video driver?  All of these things make a difference!  Additionally, there is a way to set the NI services (or any service for that matter) to run when needed as opposed to automatically running on startup. To do this, open the Windows Control Panel, and click on “Administrative Tools” and open “Services”.  From here you can start and stop services, as well as configure them to run in “manual” mode which will start them only as needed.

There should never be a problem with uninstalling NI Software due to NI services running.  The proper way to uninstall LabVIEW is to first shut down all NI programs you have open.  Then, go to control panel->add/remove programs->national instruments software and choose “change”.  From here you can uninstall LabVIEW by clicking on it and selecting “remove”.  Installing 8.0.1 should have had no effect on the NI services or LabVIEW.  Did you reboot and mass compile the LV directory after the 8.0.1 install?  It’s also important to note that all of the LabVIEW 8.0 installers are the same.  The version of LabVIEW that is installed depends on which version is “unlocked” based on the serial number you enter when activating LabVIEW.

It is entirely possible that for some reason one of the NI services is hanging, or behaving poorly.  I think you were on the right track with starting debugging from that point.  We could also try to determine which exact service is causing problems, then determine which software that service installed with and troubleshoot from there.

I assure you that many people are running with all sorts of NI software combinations on their machines without these problems.  If there is some problem with an NI service on your machine, installing a new version of LabVIEW might not make a difference anyway.  I do apologize that this has been causing you problems, and I thank you for the debugging completed so far.  I hope this information proves useful -- please let us know how things go!

[tadk]

My machine: 512GB, 1.5Ghz .

Sorry, but none of those assumptions (Add/Remove will actually do something, for instance) apply when the NI SW decides to really misbehave. I have spent most of a day just trying to purge my machine from every last trace of NI SW so I could install again. Msblast and the registry purge only does half the job. Many files still left in the windows folders. After much hair-pulling I finally got to a point where the install disk would do more than just tell me I already had a newer run-time engine installed, but after what I thought was a complete re-install I still can't open a vi. 

"Failed to start because niorbu.dll was not found"

"Resource not found. nilvaiu.dll is not a valid labview file".

Lots of other possiblities I suppose including bad HD, bad RAM,  bad CDs, but the only problems I have had are with NI SW.

[Travis_M.]

Humm..... Interesting problem, and I'm sorry that its one that you are experiencing!

I'm pretty certain that though the manual file renaming, repairs, and reinstalls that the state of NI software on your computer is very unstable.  You mention that msiblast and the registry are not total solutions.  This is not completely unexpected, and we do have additional steps that you can take to remove the software.  Because of software piracy issues we do not publish them, but your AE that you contacted in May should be aware of the steps you need to take.  Using the Service Request that you had used before, give us a call at 1-866-275-6964 to speak with the AE you contacted personally and ask about this.

I suppose we could supply you with those missing DLLs and their location to appease LabVIEW, but I think this could have dangerous versioning side-effects so let’s start with reinstalling and getting LabVIEW to open a VI first.

Again, sorry that this has been a problem, please let me know how things go.

Message Edited by Travis M. on 06-13-2006 01:52 PM

[tadk]

When I first went down the uninstall path, I mistakenly selected "remove" instead of "change" when I went into add/remove. If you do this you lose the option to later select 'repair'.

So after re-installing and finding things still not working, I properly selected add/remove->change->repair. The repair process hung up a couple of times and I just had to 'ignore', but an hour or so later labview seems to be working again.