StellarNet EPP2000 USB Spectrometer, invalid handle and error 1097

[Jim12345678]

I have a collection of StellarNet spectrometers that are about a decade old.  The company sent me the VIs that they wrote for them and their legacy installer for their own software.  The instruments run under their own software but not using the VIs they provided.  It was written for 32 bit LabVIEW.  I'm running LabVIEW 2018 32 bit.  After much mucking about writing my own and simplified version of their code, I managed to get the spectrometers mostly working for one day but then I had to reinstall the LabVIEW license manager and NIMAX on my machine which meant uninstalling the NI package manager and they have not worked since.  StellarNet hasn't been helpful and I'm not sure how I got them working to begin with.  I was modifying code based on guessing at what it did.  I have a hard time believing that the license manager and NIMAX have much to do with it, but I don't have any other explanation.   I often but not always get error 1097 and some "unknown handle" that I think is being generated by the dll and not LabVIEW.  The dll configuration sent was stdcall, but I've tried c and that doesn't do much of anything that I can tell.  Any general ideas what to do?  I would have thrown in the towel by now if it weren't for having seen them work intermittently.

[Jim12345678 · Accepted solution]

I have to run LabVIEW as administrator.  The StellarNet DLLs are hard coded to write to the prescribed StellarNet install directory c:\program files\.... and unless I run as administrator, they are denied access to the location.

[rolfk]

If you have admin rights for that computer you could also change the access rights to the StellarNet installation folder so your current user has write access rights. Not clean and not a nice solution but still better than running as admin.

NI does the same for the LabVIEW installation folder during installation (which they can since the installer needs to run with admin rights anyways).