Visa Serial Communication errors out after about 30-60 minutes of operation

[SHentchel]

I have a serial communication VI that we run as part of a ~70 minute test. This program is working and the first test station we set it up on is functioning fine. However when I installed on a second station with the same hardware the test throws a VISA error (Hex 0xBFFF0000) Unknown system error after 30-60 minutes of operation, VISA continues to throw errors until the device it's communicating with is reset. I tried swapping the hardware with the working test station and this hardware worked fine on the other computer. The code is also identical, the only difference is the computers, though both are running the same Windows 10 64-bit OS, though they may not have been configured the same way. Is there a Windows setting that may be causing this issue?

[santo_13]

One common issue is the Windows USB power saving setting which would disable the USB port after a certain time of inactivity.

If you're using PCI/PXI-GPIB, the likely issue is in your code and timing of execution. Maybe, it is executing faster that you don't give enough time for the instrument to reply and there is no way to recover from the error caused by this.

Please share the code in LV2016 format to getter a better audience reach to review the code for potential issues.

[SHentchel · Accepted solution]

Good advise, I did go back in and check the power settings on the com ports. I could have sworn I had disabled the option to allow the port to be shut off, but when I checked it was back on. So I disabled it and restarted the computer, but when I went back in to double check, the setting was re-enabled.

Turns out there was a pre-installed program on this computer called "Dell Optimizer" which was messing with the standby settings and quite a few other critical windows settings in the background. Uninstalling it fixed the problem.