DAQmx broken even after full re-install

Question

I’m having a nightmare problem with DAQmx libraries having somehow become corrupt in my LabVIEW installation on my laptop. It's LV8.5 and I'm on Windows XP SP2.
The problem is that they can’t find the nilvaiu.dll. I get the error: "nilvaiu.dll a dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed." I have checked and the dll is most definitely there in both C:\WINDOWS\System32 and C:\i386.
Having googled around, I found the problem mentioned in a few places and have followed the recommendation to do a clean re-install which I have done. I followed the instructions that had been sent from NI tech support using MSIBlast, cleaned out everything including the repository entries and then reinstalling from scratch. But the problem is still there!
I have tried to mass compile the DAQmx libraries and get a sequence of "Bad VI" errors (log attached).
In desperation I have also tried copying both the nilvaiu.dll and the DAQmx folder from vi.lib from a working installation on another machine but to no avail.
Also, when I start up my laptop, I get the error “nidevmon application failed to initialize properly”. This also should have been dealt with by the reinstall but hasn’t so I suspect these two problems are related.
It’s worth pointing out that my laptop is a new machine which I recently migrated from my old laptop which was on it’s last legs. The migration tool I used successfully migrated all software except for device drivers so I suspect there’s something which DAQmx or nilvaiu.lld depends on which is not installed properly but since it doesn’t give me any helpful errors or any indication as to what it’s dependant on I have no hope of tracking this down.
I have also tried doind a "repair" from the "add and remove applications" angle but also to no avail.
Any clues would be most welcome as I'm at the end of my teather with this.
Attachments:
DAQmx.txt ‏4 KB

Answer 1

This is really a long-shot but have you checked with any security conflicts on your machine?  Are there issues with firewall or permissions?  I am just recently running Vista and have had some odd issues.  For instance, I cannot write to a file or create a file in "C:\" without some sort of irritating security message.  You could try to run LabVIEW.exe as an administrator to see if that helps.  Navigate to your LV directory (something like "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.5"), right-click the exe, select properties and then check the "Run this program as an administrator" box.
Another parting thought is a possible conflict with any virus scanning software.  You might want to track those things down, turn them off, and then test your problem again.  This could just be Mircosoft's way of subtly saying "All your base are belong to us!".
-cb