TestStand Crashes Upon Hovering on the File Open Tab

1. Set the MRUFiles value (Most Recently Used Files) to 0
2. Remove any Unicode characters from your TestStand sequence file name
3. Shorten the path length of the TestStand sequence file

Set the MRUFiles value (Most Recently Used Files) to 0

1. Navigate to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\National Instruments\<TestStand 20XX (XX-bit) > and delete layout_current.bin and SeqEdit.xml files.
2. Launch TestStand to allow it to automatically recreate the deleted files.
3. Close TestStand. 
4. Confirm that new layout_current.bin and SeqEdit.xml files have been generated.
5. Open SeqEdit.xml in Notepad or Notepad++ and modify the MaxMRUFiles value to 0.

Remove any Unicode characters from your TestStand sequence file name

1. Remove any non‑English or Unicode characters from your TestStand sequence file names.
2. Open a few different TestStand sequence files that use only English characters until the crashing behavior stops.
3. Ensure that the “Most Recent Files” list under the File menu contains only filenames with English characters to prevent TestStand from crashing.
   

Shorten the path length of the TestStand sequence file

1. If the sequence file’s directory path includes non‑English characters or is excessively long, try shortening the path.
2. For instance, if the file is stored under:
   C:\User\<username>\测试文档\测试子文档\测试子文档2\序列文件名称.seq
   consider reducing it to something like:
   C:\User\<username>\测试文档\序列文件名称.seq

If your TestStand sequence file name includes non‑English or other Unicode characters, TestStand may have trouble processing them properly.

As a temporary diagnostic step, try toggling the “Use Unicode UTF‑8 for worldwide language support” setting in Windows, as referenced in the article “TestStand LabVIEW UI Crashes When Using Chinese Characters.”.
If the option is currently off, turn it on; if it is on, turn it off. Afterwards, check whether the TestStand crash still occurs.

If changing this UTF‑8 setting stops the crash, the root cause is related to Unicode encoding.

When the UTF‑8 option is disabled, Windows uses multi‑byte encoding; when it is enabled, Windows switches to single‑byte encoding. Since Unicode characters naturally require multiple bytes, they consume significantly more memory than standard English characters.

If Unicode characters are present in your TestStand sequence file name, TestStand may be unable to shorten or abbreviate the file path shown in the Most Recently Used (MRU) list under the File menu within the required byte limit. When this happens, the TestStand UI can become sluggish or unresponsive, ultimately resulting in a crash.