Nimax Error

[Eunsal]

Hello,

We were running a Labview program on our Biaxial Stretcher and suddenly we got an error message saying that there is an application error on "nimax.exe". Later we restarted the computer, however this time we get the errors on the windows startup (not even starting the labview program itself). We have captured the screen and I have put it as attachment.

I have read couple posts on labview website about the same issue, and people generally recommended in there to uninstall and reinstall the labview or just NI-max portion.

1) What might be the problem causing this application error to occur? (To prevent it from happening again in the future)

2) I was wondering if there is an easier solution to this problem rather than uninstalling everything and installing them back again.

3) If we have to uninstall and install all drivers and labview program, do we lose the settings and calibrations on our machines that we are working on? I mean do we need to modify everything again after the un/reinstallation progress.

Thank you for your time.

Emre Unsal

[Stephen_S.]

Hi Emre,

There are multiple reasons for the "nimax.exe" error to be reported, but there is nothing that you are doing that should cause this error again in the future. If you want to try to find a solution to this problem without removing your entire LabVIEW installation, you should first make sure you have the most recent versions of any drivers you are using, which you can find here. The new drivers should also install the newest version of Meaurement & Automation Explorer (MAX). There is a small chance that the error is being caused by a database corruption in MAX, which you can attempt to solve using the steps here. Otherwise, removing and reinstalling all of your NI software will take care of the issue.

As far as saving your configurations, you can export the configuration files from MAX by using the Configuration Export Wizard located in File>>Export... to save the files to your hard drive.

Regards,
Stephen S.

[JonDut]

NiMax needs a complete rewrite!   

Needing to uninstall and reinstall 1400 Megabytes  of code because of a stupid error of this stupid little program is completely unacceptable!  You are a software company and you SHOULD write robust code!   

Then when I try to repair it with Ni utility I get these stupid errors like "Could not stop service "NI GPIB Hw Enumeration service" (gpibenumsvc) .  Verify you have sufficient privileges. " 

I am the administrator of this machine.  Any idiot can count to 32 ( the number of GPIB devices)   Why not use the standard windows error " Enter the administrator password to continue"?   This NiMAX error has plagued me for over 10 years now on at least 5 different machines and wasted countless hours of my time.  I installed latest versions of NiVisa and Ni488.2 two days ago, on this very capable Windows 10 machine ( 16 G Ram, Intel uP) that I have owned for 9 months and has never thrown an error with very complex simulations,  and NiMAX ran successfully exactly ONCE.   Now you want me to reinstall both packages again?   What is my time worth?   

If the NiMAX data base gets corrupted easily you NEED to rewrite how it is done.  I see by doing Google searches that this is a common problem, and that there is no easy fix.  

I am VERY frustrated, as I need to make code that can be easily deployed across multiple locations and I NEED NiMAX to search out the addresses of the instruments I need my program to communicate with. I do not want to make my system dependent on a poorly designed piece of code.  Others are exploring Python and/or Keysight Visa options, and it looks like I will need to do that as well, because this is just not acceptable!  JonDutra(AT)apple(DOT)com

[Bob_Schor]

Could you please provide a little more information about your system to help us make better suggestions and possibly understand better the nature of your problem?

• What version of LabVIEW are you using?
• What Toolkits and Modules have you installed?
• What Device Drivers are you using?
• Under what circumstances does this error occur?
• Do you have problems when:
  • developing code in LabVIEW (i.e. running LabVIEW in Development mode, creating programs, using Project Explorer, etc.?
  • testing LabVIEW code by running it?
  • building and running executables?
  • running NI MAX "stand-alone" and interacting with hardware?
• What hardware devices are you hooking up to LabVIEW/MAX?

Bob Schor

[altenbach]

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@JonDut wrote:

I am the administrator of this machine.     

---

Windows 10 has a better security model (and that's a good thing!), so even if you are administrator, it does not mean that the software you are running has automatically also administrator privileges and can do whatever it wants (unless you actually right-click..run as administrator).

If you use windows 10, you probably should not follow 10+ year old advice (or respond to a 10 year old thread), because it might be stale and not even applicable to windows 10. It is impossible to get to the gist of your problem or help, because 90% of your post is just rambling. Are all your software versions officially supported under windows 10?

So start answering Bob's questions above and we'll try to help.