Call for wisdumb:  Has anyone encountered fatal problems with the Notes 8.0x Windows clients after applying certain recent MS patches?  At my day job, my contractors started having problems yesterday with their Notes 8.00 and 8.01 clients.  You start the client, and before you even see the login box, the client crashes and reports it has to close.  Nothing particularly notable in the Eclipse dump.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the client doesn't help.  Worse, even rolling back the last two updates my workstation has gotten from our corporate SDS servers doesn't help, so it appears that whatever got "patched" is so deeply embedded that it can't be undone by going back to previous system restore points in msconfig.exe!

As with every problem I encounter, there's something weird about it.  In this case, it's that the 8.5b1 client is unaffected!

If you exit the 8.5b1 client and crash the 8.0x client, and then kill it and try the 8.5b1 client, it still runs just fine.

We are mystified, so if you've run into this, let me know, OK?

1. Volker Weber07/01/2008 06:57:47 PM
Homepage: http://vowe.net

So, you don't know what the root cause is, but it is Microsoft?

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2. Turtle07/01/2008 11:22:01 PM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

It's what I call a "Close'n'Play Problem." Tied into the Four Rules of Debugging, you look for the one thing that changed. Absolutely nothing has changed on five otherwise good-running workstations. A nightly download of nothing but MS patches is made outside of our control. All five workstations fail in exactly the same way. There are no other change factors. This is directly covered by Debugging Rules 3 and 4... "when's the last time it worked right," and "what'd you do to fuck it up?"

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3. Eric Mack07/02/2008 01:32:26 PM
Homepage: http://www.notesonproductivity.com

We have a client reporting the same problem....

Have you identified a fix for this yet?

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4. Turtle07/03/2008 02:13:18 AM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

Nope, but a workaround appears to be setting up a local administrator account on the machine and logging into that (not the domain account) when you need the Notes 8 client. That smells a lot like a permissions/security profile thing.

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5. Turtlw07/03/2008 02:53:29 PM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

More about this: among other things, we found that usually, the 8 client will run if you log in as a local administrator of the machine, rather than to your Windows domain account. Also, we found to our amazement that if you run the Lotus Notes Diagnostic and have it parse the NSD file from the crash, it can then successfully invoke the 8 client, even though you can't do it directly yourself!

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