LV7.1 & Win2K SP4 Compatabil​ity?

Question

I had LV7.0 Professional Development Suite installed on an Allen Bradley 6155 without problems. The 7.1 CD's came in, so I installed those on the same machine. When LV7.1 is running I open Help>VI,Function, & How-To Help, and use the Index tab search for a control for the front panel (like "buttons->front panel") or a function (Like "add") and double click to open it's "Help" screen. The "Help" screen opens fine, but the "Place on Function Block", "Place on Block Diagram", "Find..." and "Place..." features in the help screen don't do anything. No errors, no warnings, the pallets don't open, nothing... The screen kind of flashes like the program is off doing something, but nothing happens. Stopped 7.1 & started 7.0, and these featur
es work fine.
Disabled the virus checker & there is no internal firewall.
Tried a virgin install of 7.1 on an brand new AB PC, & got the same
thing. (So maybe it was the AB brand of PC) Then tried a virgin install
on a real IBM with Win2K, and got the same results. (AB installed the
Win2K on the AB machines, I installed the Win2K from CD on the IBM machine)
Checked services to see if VI Server was running, stopped it, restarted it, set
it to manual start, the auto start...made no difference.
Looked to see what ports VI Server is using by doing a http:/localhost:3580/dumpinfo?, and both 7.0 & 7.1 are
using ports in the same range, so that shouldn't be an issue. Only difference was with LV7.1 there was an extra entry that's not there in 7.0: "National Instruments/LabVIEW/Labview/7.1/OpenViFromHelp" HTTP/1.0 302 Moved Temporarily Server:LabVIEW Help/1.0.0 Connection:Close Location http://127.0.0.1:1461/OpenVIFromHelp?% I think this is the issue, but don't know wh
y or how to fix it.
I've pointed all of this out to Austin, but they are stumped...now they want me to try an install on a XP machine...I don't know what that will prove...I have to use Win2K.
Anybody seen anything like this?
Mike

Answer 1

Hi Mike,
This is strange behavior indeed! Here are a couple questions for you to get more information regarding the situation:
1. Are you trying to use the Find/Place feature in LabVIEW 7.1 while LabVIEW 7.0 is concurrently open and running?
2. As far as the OpenVIFromHelp item showing up in the dumpinfo for LabVIEW 7.1, this should not be causing the problem. OpenVIFromHelp was simply a new feature in 7.1, hence it not existing in 7.0. You should see separate items in the list for DropControlOrFunction and HighlightPaletteMenuItem. If he is comfortable doing so, it might be useful to get the entire dumpinfo output when you have (a) just 7.0 open, (b) just 7.1 open, (c) both open.
3. Can you launch the NI Example Finder in 7.1 and open exam
ples from it? Example Finder makes significant use of Service Locator as well and it will be a good indication of whether the Service Locator is working properly.
Thanks again!
Kileen C.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments