Starting with an SMTP email that was received by 15 people on Monday, we have had some crazy Notes issues. It was so bad that we really haven’t had time to call support. At first I thought it was just that particular email, but then some other users had the same issue with other emails. And on top of that, at least 2 people called in to say that they just couldn’t open their Notes Client and, after speaking with them, they weren’t even looking at a suspect email.
Basically, we are seeing that people are forwarding web pages as emails instead of doing the sane thing and just sending a link. This will yield a javascript error when a Notes user opens the email. If the user chooses “Yes” to continue loading the email, then the client crashes. Choosing “No” will not allow them to read this email from Lotus Notes.
So, what’s the big deal? In order to get the Notes Client running again, we have to uninstall, delete the C:/Program Files/Lotus/Notes folder after backing up a few files (names, bookmark, journal, id, and user.dic), and then reinstall Notes. We have tried everything we know of to keep from doing this. Just reinstalling over Notes doesn’t work. The clients are a mix of 7.0.1 and 7.0.2. I think we have two calls that just came in…
Subject: RE: Having to reinstall Notes clients after crashes!
Steve, thanks. This is only happening on the clients, though and it’s generally with a javascript error. I have not enabled the TNEF converter on our server because I saw all the problems people were having. We are at 7.0.2 on the server and I plan on going to FP1 maybe this weekend.
Subject: RE: Having to reinstall Notes clients after crashes!
Are you sure you have to re-install the client to fix this? Have you tried deleting bookmark.nsf and maybe the cache.ndk? Bookmark.nsf will be rebuilt from desktop.ndk and the cache is automatically created upon client startup.If you haven’t tried deleting bookmark.nsf and cache.ndk I would give that a try before re-installing the client from scratch. Also, you can just delete everything below the first 3 lines of the Notes.ini and then restart the cliennt and it will do a re-install. You can also rename and or delete desktop.ndk which will also be re-created on client startup. Albeit without any of the icons that the user may have had on the workspace.
Subject: RE: Having to reinstall Notes clients after crashes!
After my post Thursday, I was able to call Lotus Support. I worked with them for 2 hours on a specific PC on which Notes was crashing. The NSD pointed to the automatic diagnostic collection as the faulting task. We believe that there is an issue with that Desktop Settings option, but we haven’t had issues with ADC in the past. The actual “quick” resolution I have come up with is to delete all but the top 4 lines of the notes.ini and rename the names.nsf file. We thought that since ADC was the offender that if we just cleared out the ($Policies) view of names.nsf that this would help us, but it did not. So we now just rename the file and copy/paste the information needed back into the new one.
This is still not sitting well with me. I think the real issue is something in the notes.ini because on the reinstalls we did, we always kept the names.nsf.
As part of the DST changes, I wanted to make sure that the clients wouldn’t have a bad notes.ini setting, so per IBM documentation I added UseNotesTimeZone=0 to my Desktop Settings document. It was on Tuesday afternoon after I enabled this that our problems began. In my 2 hour call with Lotus, I was informed that this setting should actually not exist at all. Even though the documentation states that is should be set to “0”, I was told that they have heard of client issues (crashes) with this setting existing. Since we knew I made this change, I tried deleting that line from the notes.ini, but the client would still crash. Perhaps if this happens more today I will remove that line and clear the ($Policies) view in hopes of resolving the issue.
And, of course, I made sure all notes-related tasks and any other tasks that could cache the notes.ini or id were all ended (PIM software, BlackBerry software, multi-user cleanup, etc…) I had even tried deleting the perweb.nsf and ~notes.lck files before calling Lotus (as Chris Miller alluded to in his comment on my first post). Oh well, it was nice to receive a call from my EVP Sunday afternoon stating that our President and CEO could not open his Lotus Notes…