Case of the Panasonic TOUGH Book Barcode Settings Failure

These devices are just a pleasure to build automated deployments for. Not. Many people just give up and use the OEM image.

There are a few problems to contend with:

#1 – Drivers & Utilities must be installed in correct order (example: Smart Card driver may prevent others installing…)

#2 – Finding the hidden command line option

PSCDMenu.exe /Auto /Component Essential /Destination “c:\util2”

to auto-install all “essential” 70 drivers/utilities in-order (not to mention the nice 1 GB package it comes in)

#3 – Finding what breaks that automated install of all 70 drivers/utilities (hint: read the log file in c:\util2 and look for any drivers with an exit code other than 0)

#4 – Dealing with the 5 auto-reboots caused by the installation of 70 drivers/utilities in Zero-Touch deployments

Having sorted all the above one final issue remained – at every logon the Panasonic Dashboard utilities launched  a sub-process, “Barcode mode switch utility”, to configure the bar code scanner. This would always fail with the following error message:

Barcode setting failed. Please end the barcode-related application and then retry.

Re-installing all bar code software drivers & utilities + the usual reboot failed to do anything to alleviate this message.

Using ProcMon nothing was immediately obvious.

I then launched Panasonic’s Barcode Configuration Utility with API Monitor ( http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor )

This failed with Barcode Setting Utility failed to access the barcode reader module.

API Monitor can monitor MessageBox calls and the relevant parameters – so it was simply a matter of searching for the text in the error message box to find the related event. I also added ISDC_Rs.dll as an “External DLL” to monitor – as this had been labelled “The Barcode Driver” I then looked backwards through the log for errors. What I found was the error message:

Overlapped I/O operation in progress

Scrolling further backwards through the log I found what I/O this was referring to – a CreateFile call to COM3

Looking in device manager we could then see the device COM3 along with Intel® Active Management Technology – SOL (COM3)

I uninstalled the the device, and chose delete driver option (because I had driver files on hand…)

After giving back the driver to this device Intel Active Management was back – on a different COM Port

Suddenly the barcode application was happy – at first logon we now received message Settings were applied successfully.

and off we could go on our merry way doing 2D barcode scans…

The problem was SCCM had installed the Intel Active Management Technology driver *before* the Panasonic Toughbook driver package had a chance to do it’s stuff, and taken over the COM port for the barcode scanner. And COM ports don’t like to be shared.