Good morning all.
I’ve been struggling with a strange issue with Notes 6.5.4 when we attempt to install it on Windows XP. I was wondering if there are people out there with similar setups to ours, if they have had any experience with this issue and any possible solutions to the problem.
Here’s our environment. 90% of the users in our environment have a set-up where their notes files are local and their data directories are stored on a network drive where each user has their own home directory. We do this so that the users desktops and address books are backed up, because if this information is lost, it’s a total headache for our support staff. As a result we’ve picked up a trick that if we terminate a user and re-assign their PC, we simply go into the add/remove programs control panel and do a repair of Notes, and then the new user’s data directory is built during the repair. We clear out the notes.ini to make it look like a fresh install and reconfigure the clients.
This trick works for Notes 6 in XP, and it works for Notes 6.5 on a Win2K system. But for Notes 6.5 on XP, we have an issue.
The problem is that when we install 6.5 on one of our XP systems, the program only shows up in add/remove programs for the user that the program was initially installed for. This bags the “trick” mentioned above, and makes it a total pain in the ass to get new users installed on recycled PCs that reside at our divisions and have no need to be shipped back to corporate.
I attempted to manually modify the registry using Installshield to add the entries that I believed would add the control panel to all users accounts, but when I attempted to install the client, it errored out on that part of the install, claiming I did not have sufficient rights to change the registry, even though I have administrator rights.
Also, the one member of our hardware/software support staff who has been working on this issue claims that even installing the software as an administrator only creates a add/remove programs entry on the admin account, although I haven’t been able to verify this.
Does anyone dealt with any issues like this one? We’ve pulled apart the installer, the registry and everything else we can think of trying to solve this. Unfortunately, these problems are delaying our roll out of 6.5 and of Domino Web Access.
Does anyone think a call to IBM would be helpful, or would they hang up on us due to our environment? Unfortunately we can’t do roaming or multi-user installs because our Notes servers already have disk space issues, and the multi-user installs install to the local drive as I’ve seen, and we can’t back up the address books if that is the case.
Any insight or wisdom on this issue would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Brandt