Weird NavMonPC problem

[bitbaltic]

NavMonPC on my onboard computer has seemingly fallen apart. I took the boat for a sail on Sunday having not used the boat (or the PC) for a week. When last used both the PC and NavMon functioned perfectly, but before heading out on Sunday I booted NavMon up and it looked like this:



Menus missing, bits blank etc etc. As far as I can see it is still displaying data and working properly, it's just that the graphics of the interface aren't working properly.

This morning the problem is still there, so I've uninstalled it and re-installed. This has not cured the problem.

Otherwise the PC is working fine and there's no issue with any other software (e.g. seatrak) running on Windows 8.1.

I'm concerned that this is a PC issue rather than something to do with the software, but it does seem to be confined to NavMonPC so I thought I'd check and see if anyone has encountered a similar problem and has a fix.

Thoughts chaps?

Cheers

 

[Danny]

I see that the only remaining menu items are the true and apparent wind charts. What happens if you click on either of these? Does the "dials" option then appear on the menu?

How about a restore to a restore point from before the time that the fault appeared.

 

[TSB240]

Are you getting all the NMEA data from your gps and from your Simrad instruments via one link to the PC? I seem to remember I tried this and had a similar problem of data overload.
Check the nmea data inputs on each port and the rerouting in Navmon PC as you might find your settings have changed back to a default setting?

 

[AntarcticPilot]

I'd suspect that the COM port on which the NMEA data are received has changed, and that NavMon doesn't automatically pick up the change. Is there an option for specifying which COM port received data? If there is, then examining the device properties of the relevant USB port should uncover which is being used.

 

[bitbaltic]

Are you getting all the NMEA data from your gps and from your Simrad instruments via one link to the PC? I seem to remember I tried this and had a similar problem of data overload.
Check the nmea data inputs on each port and the rerouting in Navmon PC as you might find your settings have changed back to a default setting?

The data is multiplexed by a Shipmodul unit with a USB output so there's no overload problem with the feed to the PC, if I simply connect SeaTrak to the virtual COM the gps, AIS etc work fine (I'm only using NavMon at all becuase SeaTrak doesn't have wind or speed repeaters). NavMon itself still displays all the data correctly, it's just it's graphical interface which has collapsed. You can't check any of the routing inside NavMon because the menus are mostly blank when you pull them down, just occasional characters or fragments of words from the menu list displayed, so you don't know what to select, and the panels are blank or mostly blank when you randomly click on menu elements (the clickable elements are still there, the words aren't).

I see that the only remaining menu items are the true and apparent wind charts. What happens if you click on either of these? Does the "dials" option then appear on the menu?

How about a restore to a restore point from before the time that the fault appeared.

Actually all the menu items are still there, in the sense that there's a little area that you can highlight and click; the menu that opens is blank though.

As I say the software appears to be working correclty but its graphical interface hasd collapsed.

Shortly after the problem appeared the computer demanded to do a windows update so briefly I thought it might be that. However it didn't work any better after the update. I've uninstalled and re-installed and even rolled back to an older version, and the problem remains the same.

I'll ask on the NavMonPC forum. If that doesn't lead anywhere, it looks like going for a restore point is a very good idea.

Thanks for the contributions chaps

Cheers

 

[bitbaltic]

Thought I would close this out for reference for future forum readers. I fixed the problem by uninstalling NavMonPc. The uninstaller leaves the executeable behind and when I ran the .exe it worked perfectly, all menus and dialogues working fine (with the exception of the pic of the developer's boat on the startup splash screen, which is now blank). The uninstaller removed Franson serial tools, so I copied the Franson .exe from another PC with a still-working copy of both NavMonPC and Franson, installed it on the ship's PC, uninstalled it in order to clean up, and re-installed it again.

It all works perfectly now but was very frustrating. All I can conclude is that some part of the NavMonPC installation had become corrupted and this was not being removed (or overwritten) by the repeated uninstalls/reinstalls.