Hmm, there was a problem I had there but I thought the version I packaged had fixed it. My current development version should find that path - but it depends quite a lot if you have multiple Pythons installed on your machine. BAsically there doesn't seem to be a bullet proof way of getting the correct path in Windows....
That's a sensible idea - it's going into the development code.
That's largely a result of the test client being mainly aimed at debugging the protocol and for testing message handling rather before moving on to code to more tightly integrate LabVIEW programs with the remote kernel. That said, I'm in the process of adapting the client to allow different methods of locating and connection to the kernel and that will include suppressing the kernel shutdown message on exit.
I'm also (very slowly) working on an implentation of a LabVIEW universal-binary-json serialiser/deserialiser with a view to creating some custom ipython messages for transferring binary data efficiently between LabVIEW and Python. The idea is that the LabVIEW client would create message handlers at the Python end that would allow LabVIEW data to be pushed directly into the Python namespace or to request python data to be sent back to LabVIEW. Don't hold your breath though, the day job comes first...