Visa resource error for "users" of Win 2000 and XP

[Tom at Onset]

Visa does not work for "users" of Windows 2000 or XP. It works fine for "Administrators" or those with administrative privileges, however.

Is there a way to make Labview VI's and executables that use VISA resources work for users of Win 2000 or XP withOUT changing a user's access priveleges?

Thanks,

Tom

[Zvezdana S.]

Tom,
The NI-VISA library (visa32.dll) will fail to load because a registry key it is trying to open with read/write access privilege does not work for Guest users on Win2000. To solve this problem, do the following steps:
Step 1: Log on the computer as the administrator.
Step 2: Explicitly grant the guest account write access. To do this, run regedit32.exe, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\National Instruments\NI-VISA for Windows 95/NT. Choose the Security>>Permissions menu item. If "Everyone" is present, double-click it and modify the permissions to "Full Control". If not, click "Add", choose "Everyone", and give them "Full Control".
If the full control (read/write access) on this key doesn't work, they try again with just read access. The write access
is only used for one special feature that we may not support for that type of user.
I hope this helps.
Have a great day.

Zvezdana S.
National Instruments

[Tom at Onset]

Zvezdana,

Is there any way around this (automated during Visa installation or otherwise)? I have no problem changing the security preferences on my computer, but we're planning to distribute runtime executables with our products and we don't want to inconvenience our customers.

Thanks,

Tom

[Zvezdana S.]

Tom,
I believe that NI-VISA 2.5.2, that comes with LabVIEW 6.0.2, will allow you to log in as a "User", which has the highest restriction next to the "Guest".
I hope this helps.

Zvezdana S.
National Insturments

[Dan_Mondrik]

Tom:

The NI-VISA 2.5.2 and 2.6 releases solve this problem. Any user with a valid installation on their machine can upgrade to 2.6 by going to www.ni.com and choosing Download Software.

Dan Mondrik
Senior Software Engineer, NI-VISA
National Instruments