Visual Studio Projects with NI Drivers May Blue Screen or Corrupt Files

Updated Jul 27, 2023

Reported In

Software

  • Microsoft Visual Studio

Driver

  • NI-DAQmx

Operating System

  • Windows

Other

Visual Studio

Issue Details

There is a known issue with Visual Studio incremental builds that may lead to an internal NI driver component causing file corruption and blue-screens from nipalk.sys. NI device drivers such as NI-DAQmx reference this internal NI driver component, so inclusion of NI device drivers in a Visual Studio project can lead to this behavior.
 

Solution

National Instruments has released an update to this internal driver component that resolves both the blue-screen and file corruption issues. You can download this update through an NI Core Driver Update, or update NI Device Drivers.

If installing this update is not possible, Microsoft has recommended the following workaround that disables Visual Studio incremental build functionality: 
Note: you must be logged in as an administrative user 
  1. Click the Start menu 
  2. Right-click My Computer (Computer on Windows Vista/7) 
  3. Click Properties 
  4. Click Advanced (Advanced system settings on Windows Vista/7) 
  5. Click Environment Variables
  6. Under System Variables, click New 
  7. Enter TRACKFILEACCESS for the variable name 
  8. Enter false for the variable value 
  9. Click OK to dismiss each remaining dialog box 
  10. Reboot

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