More as a record for posterity rather than an issue or question:

I have been reactivating an HP6890+ GC-ECD with ALS which is operating on a ChemStation B.04.05 under Windows XP. Due to the licensing arrangements of Agilent, it is cost prohibitive from a funding perspective to upgrade and transfer the license (booo Agilent!) to a more current CDS. So we ported the original hard disk and license to a virtual machine running on Windows 10.

After several whack-a-mole replacements, one of many issues that represented a road block to happiness, was that the ALS 7683A was operating fine in the Back Injector spot, but not in the front, throwing various errors. I ended up replacing the ALS Board as well as having the ALS checked out and replaced the cable, none of which fixed the issue.

Curiously the issue was reported as a KPR at Agilent as of Sep 5, 2022 as KPR #103 https://www.agilent.com/cs/library/support/Patches/SSBs/Agilent_GC_Drivers_Software.html#TTID:164427. Which states the issue as fixed but in reality the CDS version C.01.05 is not obtainable from Agilent, so this is a non-solution, besides it only works on Windows 7 and not 10 either.

I did survey our 10+ Agilent systems in the lab and did indeed find a C.01.05 installation on a LC machine. Copying the three 6890 related dlls from the DRIVERS folder to the B.04.02 machine (hpioqui01, hp68gc01, hpgc6a01), did make the problem go away, once you worked yourself through the idiosyncratic error messages in ChemStation of not having the right injector connected, ie one needs to start a new sequence template and have that sequence template use a method that definitely uses a front injector (it is a chicken-egg problem). I have not identified which dll is the key one, however, it seems it really needs to be the C.01.05 version not C.01.07, which is asking for other files as well. It should be noted that Agilent states this should be driver version 6.21, whereas it rather appears to have the version 6.11 for the CORE drivers, and 32.4.6/14/15 for the DRIVERS dll needed to fix the problem on our XP based ChemStation.