Hello All,
The following is for Chemstation running on XP (at least SP2).
The run would start and everything looked normal. During the run, the error happened. The error I kept getting was "Instrument Control - Load Bitmap" followed by "Instrument Control - Load Bitmap Failed" - A lot of boxes with those errors started popping up, and then I most of the icons would disappear. It also began writing the chromatograph on the wallpaper of the desktop.
Well I don't think this is specific to any Chemstation version nor do I think that it has anything to do with service packs for the operating system.
Steps I took to isolate the problem.
1. I had an image for this workstation from a few months past (when this station did not have the problem). I put in a new hard drive and restored the image on it. I then moved over all the data. Started the run and still had the same problem. This both confused and ticked me off.
I considered it may be video card problem or possibly an Ethernet issue.
2. I then configured another Chemstation (same version and identical hardware) to control the GC in question. Copied the method and sequence over. Everything looked good then bam! Same problem. Absolutely identical error.
So the problem followed from one Chemstation to another. AWESOME!
After considering all the possibilities, I decided it had to be a corrupt method.
Steps to fix the problem:
Moved back to the original Chemstation PC
For good measure (and a tech note I saw from an Agilent Tech) I defragged the hard drive.
For XP I have a clean.cmd that has the following. It removes nasty little fragments that windows XP keeps around to speed things up but also can cause programs to run slowly or even hang so I also ran that:
ECHO Y | del C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch\*.*
ECHO Y | del %temp%\*.*
Shut down the GC
Shut down the PC
Turned on the GC and waited for it to properly initialize (I do not use BootP)
Turned on the PC
Deleted the method via windows explorer
Recreated the method from scratch with the same name (because we wrote a protocol listing that name)
Used the same sequence
Everything ran perfectly
Since most of us copy methods instead of creating them from scratch, I assert that this is why once this error starts it happens all the time. Also, I have seen people state that they have reinstalled Chemstation and still had the issue - I would say yes because they retained all their methods and copied them back after re-installation which in turn copied the corrupt method(s).
I hope this helps because I wanted to drop kick my 7890 during all of this which took about 8 hours of nonstop troubleshooting to figure out.