We figured out the problem, the issue seemed to be backwards compatibility between the EV3 and the NXT programmed subvi's. We tried both BT and USB connections using the EV3 and had no trouble communicating with the Brick using the Mindstorms program or some of the example vi's contained within LabVIEW (i.e. the piano demo). But everytime we tried to use the open-source VI to perform our experiment, we got error codes. The error code, and which subVI threw it, depended upon the communication mode. For instance, using USB one of the Fantom subVI's failed in the FindNXT.vi.
We had been under the impression that the EV3 and NXT should be interchangeable as far as the LabVIEW code was concerned. That being said, we swapped in a NXT brick and the old program ran flawlessly. So problem circumvented but not necessarily solved...