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PHV too many windows open since DV upgrade v14

Hello,

I am looking for some help regarding trending. We upgraded our system to v14 about a year ago and have had nothing but problems with phv since the upgrade. I will try and described the problem as best as possible.

When opening a trend, a dialog box says that there are to many windows open... yet this is the first trend that was opened. Hitting Alt + Tab shows the PHV icon but when selecting it nothing happens. The only way to fix it is to log into my administrator account. Switch to windows desktop, open task manager, and end task phv. It will then work for a limited time and eventually the problem comes back. I have noticed that it seems to only happen on our thin clients that have more than 1 session running on that server. Any help would really be appreciated as operators continue to try and use trends but cannot. I have to “reset” the stations 2-3 times a week.

Thanks,

Tom M

7 Replies

  • Did you install the workstation with terminal server enabled? (RDS)
  • In reply to Lun.Raznik:

    Thanks for the Reply,

    Yes I believe so. How would I verify that
  • In reply to Thomas McGreevy:

    It is possible this is solved by v14LTS Software Update 20.
  • In reply to Thomas McGreevy:

    There is a maximum of two PHV windows permitted per workstation with Win10 OS or per RD Session on a Server OS.

    I have seen situations, especially with dual screen computers where a window is opened on the second screen and the application remembers this position, and opens there when the screen arrangement is a single screen. Is it possible that this RD Session is opened sometimes on a dual screen Thin Client and that you experience this when opening the session from a Single screen station? The fact that the window is Open and can be seen in Task Manager, but is not visible on your screen seems to indicate the session is located off screen. When you try to open additional windows, you eventually get Too many windows open.

    You can know you are connecting to an RD server as DeltaV user login will require that you select a session in addition to provide the user password. You will see the available sessions that are configured on the server in the drop down list of sessions.

    Andre Dicaire

  • In reply to Andre Dicaire:

    Thanks for the info Andre.

    So yes, that could be the issue. This is only a problem on our remote servers that have Thin Client machines with multiple monitors. There are 3 remote sessions on the first server and 4 remote sessions on the other. Each remote server has a mix of Dual and Quads monitor setups. For the third remote server we never have issues. It is has 6 sessions on it but is only used by upper management and only sees 1 monitor.

    Do you know of anything I can do to resolve the issue?

    Short Term, I was going to add some kind of button to our toolbar that "end tasks" or "Force Quits" phv.exe but im not sure what that VBA script would look like or if it is even possible.

    v14LTS Software Update 20. is that the same as the Feature Pack 2 Update?

    Thanks,
    Tom
  • In reply to Thomas McGreevy:

    The short answer is to not expect a Feature pack to be the path to an LTS issue resolution. If you report an issue on LTS, the LTS hotfix path will be the resolution.

    I believe this is a windows issue, and an artifact of RDP with sessions of different resolution size. I think this could happen on any windows application that in a previous session was open in a position that is not visible on a subsequent session. I've seen it on my business computer.

    I suggest developing the script attached to the Open PHV icon in the toolbar. First check to see if CHS.exe is open and if it is position off screen. If so, move the window to be visible. If CHS is not open, then complete the script by launching it.

    Once you've worked out the details, then you can consider firing this automatically. You don't want to lock up the Operate start up while working this out.

    I did something similar a while back, but I don't have that code handy.

    If you have a CTS call open with the GSC, they can confirm if this is considered a product issue and whether it will be addressed in any future hotfix. It would be worth ensuring the issue has been filed and if a workaround as discussed above, it would be good to have that logged on the call.

    Andre Dicaire

  • In reply to Andre Dicaire:

    Another possibility for a workaround is to use the "Reserved for Node" feature of the sessions.
    If you can have the same clients attaching to the same sessions then this should avoid the problem as a session will be reserved for a particular client and then you won't have the difference in layout to deal with.