An interesting thing just happened. I set up a new Notes 6 client (all clients), then upgraded it to 6.0.1. Played around in it for hours, trying out features. The second to last thing I did before exiting was to look at bookmark.nsf in Designer. Didn’t make or save any changes in it. The last thing I did before exiting was to save color preferences in my mail file. The new colors didn’t show up, so I exited with the hope that the changes would appear upon re-running Notes. Restarted. No color changes. Exited again. Tried to restart, and …
Notes wouldn’t start, claiming that the names.nsf database was missing. A look at notes.ini revealed that there was no “Directory” variable. I added one, then tried to restart Notes. Notes started right up. (BTW, the color changes appeared after restarting Notes.)
This happened once. Haven’t been able to repeat the behavior. Curiouser and curiouser.