Sunday, March 8, 2009

Notes 8.5 DST Oddity

I have Notes 8.5 running on my laptop and depending on my mood; I’ll run either the Basic or Standard version depending on what shortcut I click. Today I decided to use the Basic client when going in to check my mail and also to make sure that with the DST changes that went into effect today that everything was in order. Upon opening the calendar in the week view, I could see right off the bat that then entries were off an hour. Now, when I hover over those entries on Monday, the pop-up window that appears contains the correct time. Example, that first meeting tomorrow that appears to be at 9:30, shows the correct time of 8:30.
Here's where it gets even weirder. I remote connected into my "admin" workstation at the office which is running 8.0.2, and everything appears as it should be. So back on the laptop, I shutdown the Basic client and launched the Standard version. Upon opening my calendar and expanding the "Day-At-A-Glance" sidebar, I see this:
Everything appears as it should be. So I again closed down the Notes client and dug into the notes.ini file. First stop, the dstlaw= line. That appears as it should be, "DSTLAW=3,2,1,11,1,1". So I deleted it, saved and closed the notes.ini, and relaunched the client in Basic mode thinking that the error revolved around that. No change. The document information is correct but the view shows differently.
So I decided it was time to pull out my favorite Help Desk trick that I have used many a time to cure a Notes client that doesn't want to behave. Basically, you delete all but the first couple of lines of information from the notes.ini file, save and close it, and then relaunch Notes. Once Notes fires up, it launches the configuration wizard for the client and you have to step through the configuration once again. Once that was complete, I jumped into the calendar and everything appeared as it should.
So what caused it? Not sure. But again, this only happened on a computer that is running the Notes 8.5 client in Basic mode. Was an easy fix, but I wanted to share.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am uncertain what your exact usage scenario was when you experienced this, but I reported an N8 bug that occurs with the calendar when the underlying OS timezone changes and Notes is open. Doing so will cause events to appear off and holidays to show-up one day earlier.

Closing Notes --- completely (re-start box if one thinks their might programs still in memory --- then re-launch Notes, will fix the non-holiday entries.

If Notes was closed when the timezone changed, then that is a different scenario.

Glad you got it fixed.

Anonymous said...

UK customer called today, they were trying to book Rooms in advance, and the times were an hour out so they could not book from 09h00 - 10h00.

Haven't had a chance to do any investigating yet so could be anything at the moment, but wonder now if they are related.

One to watch.

Unknown said...

I had this problem in one of my machines, tried Andys fix but didn’t work for me. Luckly had another machine that was OK, so I started coping the Notes program and data directories from the good one to the bad one with no luck. Finally discovered that was a problem in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones registry. Exported the registry from the good one, deleted and imported to the bad one and problem fixed. Don’t know why but it was fixed.