Removing LabVIEW 2019 demo killed my (~$5k) LabVIEW 2018? How do I troubleshoot this??

[EngrStudent]

I have LabVIEW 2018, or did until about 10 minutes ago when I was trying to use the NIPM to get the "advanced plotting toolkit".  I noticed there were 2 updates, which I installed, and I found (finally) how to uninstall demo version of LabVIEW 2019.

The patches went through, the uninstall went through, it asked me to reboot, and now LabVIEW will not start.  This is bad.  I need it for work that I am doing today.  I need it right now.

Questions:

• Why doesn't LabVIEW 2018 start?
• What do I need to do to diagnose and resolve the issue?
• It didn't tell me that it was going to break my working software.  Why not?

UPDATE:

When I go to "My Products" it will only allow download of 2019.  The software was purchased this month, so perhaps the activation worked on my trial 2018 software instead of my 2019 software.  When I uninstalled 2019 then maybe it broke something in that … mis-enable.

UPDATE 2:

I installed 2019.  The activation initially didn't want to work but I used codes instead of serial number.  Then I uninstalled LabVIEW 2018.  Then I tried to run my stuff, and it wouldn't work because I didn't have the sparse or OpenG libraries.  So I used VIPM and am installing the libraries now, and while it wasn't the LabVIEW that I have been using for the last while, it is likely close enough to it to work.

[Bob_Schor · Accepted solution]

NIPM 19.0.0, needed to install LabVIEW 2019, seems to operate a little more "aggressively" than its earlier incarnations.  I'm currently working on a Service Request with NI (which has been "kicked up" to NI R&D) involving its penchant for uninstalling a lot of earlier LabVIEW Versions when you ask it to remove only LabVIEW 2019.

It's a "known problem".  I've now done 3 or 4 installations of "recent LabVIEWs" (2016, 2017, 2018) and tried to add LabVIEW 2019 to the mix -- I succeeded once, but have failed subsequently.  I am working with the NI team to try to figure out "what is wrong" and come up with a method that works (possibly installing one package at a time with NIPM 2019?) -- I'll Post when we are successful.

Bob Schor

P.S. -- I have been successful installing LabVIEW 2018 + 2019 on a VM running Windows 10 -- my failures have come from installing 2016 + 2017 + 2018 + 2019 on a "real" machine.  We'll try a number of scenarios and figure it out (I sincerely hope).