Monday, February 19, 2007

More Info On Our Notes Client Issue (Possible DST Implications)

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...

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