Something isn’t right with the FP2 installation. Twice now I’ve used Smart Upgrade to upgrade to FP2 only to have it kill my client. The client will just go to a splash, hang for a very long time, and then disappear.
The first time this happened, I used system restore to roll the client back to FP1 and then reinstalled FP2 without using Smart Upgrade. It was good after that.
Yesterday I decided to go back to FP1 because I (incorrectly) thought FP2 was causing a problem. Uninstalling FP2, however, broke my client because ndgts.dll was missing. I had just become familiar with that DLL earlier in the day because a couple of my users just started reporting this problem:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21410634
I eventually had to completely reinstall 8.5.1 and FP1 to get my client working again.
Today, after realizing that FP2 wasn’t causing me a problem, I decided to install FP2 again using Smart Upgrade, but again, it broke my client. My first thought was to look at that ndgts.dll. I knew from looking into the user problem referenced above that the DLL should be dated 3/18/2010 after installing FP2, but I was surprised to find that it was still dated 9/29/2009.
This time, instead of using system restore, I uninstalled FP2 even though I knew it might break things further. Sure enough, ndgts.dll was removed and my client was broken even further. This time, however, I simply reinstalled FP2, which installed the correct ndgts.dll, and my client is now working again.
To make this long story short, it seems that when using Smart Upgrade, ndgts.dll (and maybe other DLLs) aren’t being properly freed, and instead of FP2 scheduling the files to be replaced on restart and prompting for a restart, it just quietly fails to replace the files.
I have used Smart Upgrade to upgrade a couple of users to FP2 without problems, but I am very concerned about doing a mass rollout.
Neil