Sticky application. Can't end process after VISA error.

[george seifert]

I've got a built application that hangs around in the background after I get an error trying to access a VISA port. I have to use the task manager to shut it down. However, when I look at the Processes in the the WIndows Task Manager it's still there and I can't shut it down (End Process and End Process Tree do nothing). I have to log off to get rid of it. My IT dept doesn't know what's going on. Has anyone seen this?

George

[i2dx]

QUOTE(george seifert @ May 2 2007, 06:55 PM)

I've got a built application that hangs around in the background after I get an error trying to access a VISA port. I have to use the task manager to shut it down. However, when I look at the Processes in the the WIndows Task Manager it's still there and I can't shut it down (End Process and End Process Tree do nothing). I have to log off to get rid of it. My IT dept doesn't know what's going on. Has anyone seen this?

George

I wish I could help, but I hear this for the first time ...

[george seifert]

I just talked to an NI engineer about this and he don't really know what to do. He did suspect that it's a LabVIEW problem and that the program is hanging on for dear life and won't let itself be shutdown. Any ideas on how to shut this thing down - other than a reboot - would be most welcome. I have to speed up the troubleshooting process somehow.

FYI, I pared my program down to the bare minimum - open VISA, init serial port and write do a VISA write and it still hangs. I've done this a million times before in a built app, but I've never had this happen.

I think my next step has to be to try another PC.

George

[Tomi Maila]

QUOTE(george seifert @ May 2 2007, 10:44 PM)

FYI, I pared my program down to the bare minimum - open VISA, init serial port and write do a VISA write and it still hangs.

Are you able to post a bare minimum project reproducing the problem here?

Tomi

[george seifert]

QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ May 2 2007, 03:41 PM)

Are you able to post a bare minimum project reproducing the problem here?

Tomi

Unfortunately it doesn't hang on a PC without the hardware (EasyDAQ relay driver). I tried the exe on my development PC without the hardware and it doesn't hang. I'm going to try the exe on my development PC tomorrow with the hardware. I never tried the exe on the development PC - just in the development environment where it worked fine.

George

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

QUOTE(george seifert @ May 2 2007, 05:00 PM)

Unfortunately it doesn't hang on a PC without the hardware (EasyDAQ relay driver). I tried the exe on my development PC without the hardware and it doesn't hang. I'm going to try the exe on my development PC tomorrow with the hardware. I never tried the exe on the development PC - just in the development environment where it worked fine.

George

1) Are you using the latest and greatest VISA ?

2) Does NI-Spy tell you what is happening?

The "hanging around" tells me that something is not releasing a resource so Windows keeps it around.

That is all I have to offer for now.

Ben

[Tomi Maila]

Just from the symptoms my guess is following. There is a bug in the hardware driver your hardware is relying on. The process doesn't exit even when terminated because it waits for kernel level reply to hardware interface is properly closed (or something similar). Because of the driver bug, the driver never processes clean-up request. As a result your application clean-up request hangs on the driver and therefore your application never exits. If the problem was not in kernel level thread, then windows would most presumably simply shutdown the less important thread. But as far as I understand Windows won't touch kernel level processes as they are trusted to work properly and touching them could crash the whole system.

So I recommend you to contact the vendor of easyDAQ. It may be that the bug appears only in very special circumstances such that your hardware is broken, you have problems with your PC hardware, your application is doing something abnormal etc. Still I guess the underlying problem is a driver bug that only the driver vendor can debug or fix.

Tomi

[george seifert]

I just tried the exe on my PC (Dell) and it works fine. The PC that hangs is an HP. We had to start buying HP PCs and some of them have been giving us problems. Some wouldn't recoginize NI DAQ cards. I'm suspecting now that this is a PC issue.

George

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

QUOTE(george seifert @ May 3 2007, 01:02 PM)

I just tried the exe on my PC (Dell) and it works fine. The PC that hangs is an HP. We had to start buying HP PCs and some of them have been giving us problems. Some wouldn't recoginize NI DAQ cards. I'm suspecting now that this is a PC issue.

George

It's a kernel driver issue in combination with your PC hardware or more properly your BIOS. I've seen HP BIOSes creating strange things lately a few times. A few months back I tried to install a PCI-1407 card in a HP PC and decided to also install the greatest and newest NI-IMAQ with it. The card simply didn't work. It showed up in the device manager but with an exclamation mark and indicating an error 10 had occured.

While dealing with NI support about that I happened to try an older NI-IMAQ that I had from an old setup (Ver 2.5.1 or so) in comparison to Ver 3.6 and everything worked alright. Later that day I got a message from NI that the issue was known and could be resolved by downloading and installing a new BIOS for the HP computer according to this http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/F69AB8D3B7C0261F8625723E007205FF?OpenDocument' target="_blank">Knowledge Base Article. I didn't go through the hassle of installing a new BIOS since it now worked and also because I was at a customer site with firewalled internet access and optaining the BIOS would have been problematic.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[george seifert]

QUOTE(rolfk @ May 16 2007, 03:56 AM)

It's a kernel driver issue in combination with your PC hardware or more properly your BIOS. I've seen HP BIOSes creating strange things lately a few times. A few months back I tried to install a PCI-1407 card in a HP PC and decided to also install the greatest and newest NI-IMAQ with it. The card simply didn't work. It showed up in the device manager but with an exclamation mark and indicating an error 10 had occured.

While dealing with NI support about that I happened to try an older NI-IMAQ that I had from an old setup (Ver 2.5.1 or so) in comparison to Ver 3.6 and everything worked alright. Later that day I got a message from NI that the issue was known and could be resolved by downloading and installing a new BIOS for the HP computer according to this http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/F69AB8D3B7C0261F8625723E007205FF?OpenDocument' target="_blank">Knowledge Base Article. I didn't go through the hassle of installing a new BIOS since it now worked and also because I was at a customer site with firewalled internet access and optaining the BIOS would have been problematic.

Rolf Kalbermatter

We had the exact same problem with our HPs. We did what NI recommended and it works fine now with NI cards and the latest NI-DAQ.

We did try our app on a different DELL PC (other than my development PC) and it worked fine. So now I'm back to thinking it's not a PC issue but rather a driver issue. I've had a few conversations with EasyDAQ who have tried to help, but have never seen this problem before. At this point I have to move on. It wasn't a big enough hardware investment to worry about. I'm going back to Phidget relay drivers.

George