Thanks for the great feedback here! It seems that at some point a save
operation failed and caused labview to write to the temp folder. I rarely
save things outside of the normal folders and never to something buried and
hidden in Documents and Settings. Also the hard drive is not even close to
full... some 10% full with 100GB remaining. But many other things could
cause a file write to fail. Then I suspect that I got presented with a
search dialog starting in the temp folder (although I did not notice this
at the time). After i had chose the first VI there, the garbage path was
now in <found vi>/* and so it likely started pulling sub-vis from both the
main and the temp depending on which parent was trying to load the file
into memory. This would explain the seemingly random pattern of temp vs
main files. The end of the story is it took about an hour to sort out, but
I did eventually fix it.
I think this is a very important topic, and if you have further
questions or gripes, it is a good time to cover them. Might even have
something to do with what I'm working on.
I agree that this is an important topic, but the idea of further questions
or gripes is mindbendingly open ended. I can say on a very high level that
I am not satisfied with the way labview manages files and filenames. It is
much harder to say what would make me happy. But I will let it percolate
for a few days and see what revelations come to me :)
