Thursday, August 28, 2008

The saga of ~notes.lck and other client weirdness

It's a like a bad penny. This thing keeps showing up. From other reports I've been hearing since the launch of Notes/Domino 8.0.2, as well as my own blog post, people are having problems with starting up the Standard, (Eclipse based-full blown client, not the Basic-looks like R6 and R7 client) client after upgrading from 8.0.1. Again this morning I launched Notes, turned away from the screen to do some other stuff on my desk while it was starting, looked back and noticed that it was sitting at the light blue screen of the Eclipse client with my last open tabs at the top but the client locked up. So I go to a command prompt, drill down to the location on my hard drive where Lotus Notes is installed, (ie C:\Program Files\lotus\notes), and run NSD -kill. Once that's done, I open Windows Explorer and go to the data directory where my Notes is installed and find another ~notes.lck file. Delete that file and now I think I'm ready to start Notes again and get to work. Wrong. Tried launching the client again and same issues. Rinse, repeat, still locking up. So I try a different approach by first launching the Admin client. That starts up okay without any issue so I click to launch Notes and it starts up, but without my normal Workspace but the newer one with the icons for Mail, Contacts, Journal, etc. Yes, we still use the old workspace in the Notes client and probably will until they stop allowing us to. Now that I know the clients work, I shut both down and launch just the Notes client. Locked up AGAIN.
I'm going to try and do a complete uninstall/reinstall to see if this keeps happening and if it does I'll open a PMR. This is just getting plain annoying. Plus now I have to question, is this only happening on the installs that include the Admin and Developer software or is this also happening on Standard only install? Looks like I have some more testing to do before I start rolling out any more clients. Stay tuned!

11 comments:

Scott Marchione said...

Andy,

I have performed the same upgrade as you referenced, but I don't even have the ~notes.lck file on my computer. I've been using 8.0.2 Admin, designer, and client for 3 days now and all seems fine....Not that I'm discounting what you are experiencing, Just wanted to let you know that it's not universal.

Scott Marchione said...

Strike that... I do have the file, it's 0k in size, but it's there... what size is your file?

Andy Donaldson said...

Hey Scott,
Glad to hear you are not having the problems! The ~notes.lck file exists when the Notes client is running so it being there isn't the problem that I and I think others are having. It's when we get the "Blue Screen Lock Up of Annoyance" and we have to hard shut down the client either by ending the task or doing an nsd -kill command, the file doesn't go away like it would if you just shut down the client normally. In the situations I've had, I've had to manually delete that file before attempting to restart Notes. I just got done doing a complete uninstall/clean the registry/reinstall and am going to see if this makes things work better. Thanks for stopping by!

Keith Brooks said...

Andy, I reposted recently about Nathan's blog post about a clean eclipse install.

See this post and the link to nathan.
http://lotustech.blogspot.com/2008/08/sometimes-pc-is-mightier-than-user.html

Chris Whisonant said...

I'm seeing this some too on my laptop. Granted, I uninstalled 8.5 Beta. Following up with IBM on this too...

Scott Marchione said...

Well now I'm super curious. I am creating an upgrade plan for 160 people, so if you guys get an answer for this please post it so I can add it to my knowledge base for reference, because this error will certainly occur for some of my remote users 3 time zones away, thanks to Mr. Murphy and his stupid law!

Andy Donaldson said...

@Lotus Evangelist - Thanks for that link!!!

@Scott - So far, I'm the only one having the problem here but I am also the only one with the Tri-Fecta of installs installed. I just upgraded a Standard user from 8.0.1 to 8.0.2 and it's running great! Seems like it's a real hit/miss situation right now. My other "admin" machine with everything loaded is also working great. This is a weird one alright.

Anonymous said...

Andy, I have the install on 3 PC's with Admin and Developer clients. So far, the problem only manifests on one of them. Deleting ~notes.lck before start seems to avoid the problem though.

Chris Whisonant said...

On thing that I've heard to try is:

- Delete Cache.ndk
- Rename bookmarks.nsf
- REM out line EXTMGR_ADDINS= in the notes.ini file

Anonymous said...

OK, the one PC that has a problem seems to always have the problem on first start, despite removing ~notes.lck before start. Removing the file before the second start of the client does seem to make the problem go away... This is so strange...

giorgetto said...

hello endy, same problem here in Italia during the smart upgrade from
8.0.1 to 8.0.2, because I used the package Lotus notes + Admin and not
package only Lotus Notes.
With the right package I have not had more problems (for now client installed 30)

Maybe you have the same problem?