Why does LabVIEW 2009 revert to the old icon editor?

[Robert_Deschambault]

Hi,

I have noticed that sometimes when I am trying to edit the icon in LabVIEW 2009, I get the old style icon editor from LabVIEW 8.5 days instead of the more advanced new one with layers, gliphys, etc.  Once the old style editor shows up, there doesn't seem to be a way to go back to the advanced editor.  Has anyone seen this behaviour?  I have version 8.5 of LabVIEW still installed, should I remove it?  Do I need to restart my computer?

Thanks.

Bob

[tst]

The old icon editor is completely inside the IDE (I assume it's compiled straight into LabVIEW.exe), so having old versions of LV installed shouldn't affect it at all (I have several on the same PC and I've never seen what you describe).

The new editor is a VI, which can be found at <LabVIEW>\Resource\Plugins\lv_icon.vi. If you remove or rename this file, LV reverts to the old dialog. You said that this is happening sporadically, so I would suggest trying to open that VI manually when this happens and see if you see anything wrong (e.g. maybe it's broken because it calls a broken subVI somewhere and LV is smart enough to detect that and load the old one as a fallback).

[Robert_Deschambault]

Thanks for telling me about this vi.  I went to run it, but I have a broken arrow and the diagram shows a wire with a class conflict!  Where can I get a copy of the code for the icon editor?  I wonder what happened?  I haven't installed any third party libraries that I can remember??

[Robert_Deschambault]

Here are some of the errors I see ...

[Robert_Deschambault]

... and one more ...

[Robert_Deschambault]

I did load a patch to the icon editor that I found on the NI website ... but it was fairly old.  I wonder if that broke more stuff when I applied the icon editor patch.  Any way to recover, do I have to reinstall LabVIEW 2009?

[tst]

I assume that this means that you see the old editor all the time. As I suggested, it seems that if the new IE is broken, the old one loads instead.

I don't know what caused the code to break (presumably the subVIs have a cluster input which doesn't match that of the caller), but the safest bet would probably be to try reinstalling the bugfix and if that doesn't work to try using the DVD to run the repair option. Personally, I use a modified version which has some advantages and you can try that to. Search for "PJM icon editor" and you should probably find it.

[Robert_Deschambault]

Thanks for the suggestion.   I will look for the updated modified icon editor as you suggested and see if that fixes the problem.  If not, I will do a repair.

[samapico]

Had the same bug... The icon editor started to load, and turned back to the old editor after a few seconds.

I found the solution to my problem, so I'll share it here, it might help someone.

It turns out my templates file was read-only (stupid SourceSafe), so it crashed the editor. So make sure these files are NOT read-only:

...\My Documents\LabVIEW Data\Icon Templates\*

...\My Documents\LabVIEW Data\Glyphs\*

Also, thanks to this thread I got PJM's improved editor and it's great 🙂

[Robert_Deschambault]

I am glad that my problem could be of value, love this community and being able to share problems and solutions!