Hoovahh,
Thanks for your reply. Those both seem like really useful utilities... It would be great if NI could incorporate some variation of those into their user interface for everyone to use!
What I really needed was a utility that would recurse through a project folder hierarchy and tell me the version of each of several hundred vis in a project. Ultimately I wrote the utility that I'm attaching to this post. It's in LV2012, so it will only report LV versions up through 2012. If I saved it in 2010, then it wouldn't recognize LV versions later than that. I almost got to the point of byte-parsing the binary vi files to pull out their version numbers, but decided instead to use standard LV functions.
My utility will examine all vi, vit, and ctl files. lvproj files throw error 1059 when input to Get VI Reference. One could trap the error and add additional code for this special filetype, but time was getting short. The vi generates a .csv file output that you can open as a spreadsheet to sort columns, etc and use as a map to ferret out version issues in project folders that might have become inadvertently "corrupted".
I hope some of you find this useful... it was fun to code, this "VI Version Finder.vi".
Cheers,
Ted