Hello, I hope everyone is well!


We are facing a problem with operation freezing in our operating stations, we use the original LBP (Siemens) library in the project, recently we started facing operation freezes, where no popup is opened, making it necessary to download the application again so that it can operate .

Even using apdiag we did not find any errors, what we noticed is that the tool that runs the scripts stops working, as it can no longer access the database (project). All alarms and data archiving have been disabled, yet freezes still occur.

We removed the entire system from the virtualized environment and separated all areas on physical computers in an attempt to isolate the failures, we used machines with Windows server 2022 as in the virtual environment, and also with Windows 10 22H2, even so the failures occur, both in the physical environment As for virtual, permissions and other configuration items were validated more than once according to the Wincc and even PCS7 manual.

SIMATIC STEP 7 Basic/Professional V18 and SIMATIC WinCC V18

Click operations (direct access to tags) work normally, but scripts do not, and at the moment the only script running is Scrennhandling, responsible for opening the LBP library popups (and it is 100% original V2.6.0).

The problem started after one of the following operations, it is worth mentioning that we were already facing problems with delays in opening popups before the operation completely stopped, so this could be a sign that we were already having a bigger problem:

* Installed Update 3 (TIA Portal and Runtime).
* Ring Configuration (Terminal and Plantbus)
* Added another sector to the project (PLC and Scada Screens,using the same library (LBP)), shortly after adding the new area, the system stopped, but even after removing it completely, the faults continued to appear.

Attempts to resolve the problem:  Use Windows 10 on a physical machine.  Remove all data logs and alarms.  Separate all areas (6 PLCs 1517) each with its own supervisor.  Remove the entire system from the virtual environment and test it in a physical environment.  Create a new project, copying the project objects with problems to this new project, in this item we had a reasonable performance improvement, but still with freezes.

Description of system:

* 1 Pair of redundand servers
* 13 clients
* 2 Engeenering stations
* All machines are virtualized, the enviroment is Hyper-v (Windows Server 2022)
* All machines have two networks Plantbus (conection to PLC's) and TerminalBus (Conection between clientes and servers).
* Server have específic conection for redundancy.
* Ring configuration (Terminal and Plantbus)


---> System information (Engineering stations):

* Wincc Professional V18 update 4
* TIA Portal V18 update 4
* Wincc Runtime Professional V18 Update 4
* StartDrive V18 SP2 update 1
* Simocode ES V18 update 3
* Softstarter ES V18 update 3
* Windows server 2022 21H2

---> System information (Server stations):

* Wincc Professional V18 update 4
* Wincc Runtime Professional V18 Update 4
* Windows server 2022 21H2

---> System information (Client stations):

* Wincc Runtime Professional V18 Update 4
* Windows 11 23H2

---> General informations

---> Six CPU's 1517, about 500 drives Sinamics G120, 300 Simocodes, 300 softstarter's 3RW55, AS-i Networks (about 1200 instruments in many networks distributed between PLC's).

WinCC locks up and crashes no matter where you put it.  After 15+ years, have not found a solution.  It seems to be tied to network stability and communication faults, but that is just an experiential guess.