chemstation problem

[Jim]

Hi all--

I am posting this on the chance that someone else may have experienced
this problem. We have the following system:

Agilent 5973N Mass Spectrometer (networked model)
Agilent 6890N Gas Chromatograph
Tekmar Solatek 72 Autosampler
Tekmar Velocity Purge and Trap Concentrator
Chemstation version D03
PC: Dell, running Windows XP Professional, with SP3. The PC also is on
Active Directory, and has a "STIG" (security template) applied.

We are experiencing very intermittent failures on this system (every few
sequences) where the Chemstation instrument control throws and error,
and just shuts down. This has been going on since March.

The error is: msinsctl.exe
The instruction at 0x01180c2a referenced memory at 0x00000004.
The memory could not be "read". Click on OK to terminate the program.

We have done a lot of troubleshooting, mostly at the PC end, too many
things to list here. We are about to mount an all-out effort to fix the
problem. We are having problems diagnosing it, because it is so
intermittent.

Any help would be appreciated.

Jim

[David Stranz]

Jim <no_...@invaiddomain.com> wrote in
news:g69vaa$kfa$1...@news-int.gatech.edu:

This error is due to a software bug; it may be related to some
hardware problem, but even if it is, it is a bug in the software
for not handling it appropriately. This error typically occurs
because the programmer has neglected to properly initalize a
variable before using it, or the software has walked off the end of
an array of data into never-never land, maybe because some other
part of the software has read back a counter that contains an
incorrect array size due to a hardware fault.

If you haven't reported it to Agilent, you should. I'm sorry that
I can't be of any more help than this, but Agilent may be able to
use this information to both fix the software and to give you a
clue about what hardware failure is the cause of it.

David

[LC Resources]

Jim,

This is a known bug. If you dig around on the Agilent site, you should be
able to find a fix. If not, call Agilent. New versions of the software
have the bug fixed. A quick work around is to use atune.u file rather than
the target.u file as the Tune file. Let us know how this work's out for
you.

--
Regards
David

O. David Sparkman
Mass Spectrometry Facility
Chemistry Department
University of the Pacific

"Jim" <no_...@invaiddomain.com> wrote in message
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