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IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1: An Update and Reinstall No 5.

Knowing (hoping) that I will receive a call from IBM today to follow up on my Lotus Notes client installation issues, I figured that I had better go back to 8.5.1. Of course, this means that I have to survive the entire day without designer.

This time, I decided to make a note of my steps.

They are as follows;

Part 1: Knocking the Old One Off
Start, control panel
Go to add remove programs and remove Lotus Notes
Close everything down... literally everything, notepad, chrome the whole lot.
The removal took 9 minutes and this was with my antivirus and firewall shutdown.

I then went searching through the file system to locate any old directories which may have contained Lotus software. I found one on my profile under application data and I found another under program files. I deleted both of these. I also killed my old installation files.

After this, I started the registry editor and did a search for "Lotus". I killed the majority of entries except for those which were obviously irrelevant. Amusingly, I even killed desktop theme called Lotus. I think that one might ship with Windows but it isn't yellow.

Reinstallation
The next step was to reboot my PC, wait until it came up again and then shut down the antivirus and firewall services.

With nothing else running, I started the 618MB CS5S0EN.EXE setup file. Despite the fact that I don't like the default unpack settings, I decided not to change them.

In most cases, I left everything as default. The exception was in the program selection area.

Here I added;
  • The Client Single Logon
  • Designer
  • Administrator
  • The Composite Application Editor
Everything else, was left as default.

The installation process took precisely 8 minutes.

After installation, I gave the system a generous minute of time to settle itself before starting the client. I was able to connect client server fairly quickly and got to my mail with no issues. Once again, administrator loaded quite nicely but designer... it obviously didn't want to be there.

For background information, my PC is an Intel dual core 3 GHz Dell Precision T3400 with 4GB RAM and 9 GB of free hard drive space. It's running Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3.

Comments

Unknown said…
The installs do take some time... but yours seem excessive. Not the root of the problem but I'd look for some more disk space. Having only twice your memory size of free disk seems the path to disk thrashing and the designer is going to really highly this once it becomes available.
Unknown said…
Is the Designer not starting.... or not there at all ?
Gavin Bollard said…
Designer just won't start. If I click the icon after Notes has started, nothing happens at all.

If I start designer first, then it displays the splash screen and draws the little bar graph (slowly) all the way across and the hides the splash screen - then nothing else happens.

It's like it's loading eclipse but not actually starting the designer.
Anthony Holmes said…
Hi Gavin,

A tidbit of information (forgive me if you realise this already). It's unlikely to solve your current problem (but hey, you never know).

You say you selected Client Single Logon with your installation. That feature (which installs extra code to intercept passwords between Windows and Notes and synchronise them) has effectively been superceded by the Notes 8 Shared Login feature: which requires no selection at installation and doesn't try to perform under the hoods interaction with Windows.

So you'd get a simpler installation if you didn't select Single Login. (One less potential source of problems.) Instead, once Notes is running, choose: File > Security > User Security and select "Login to Notes using your operating system login".
Anonymous said…
I had the exact same thing that you have. Designer just does not want to start...

So I uninstalled it again, removed the filder Lotus\Notes\Framework,
restart the machine and install ...

It worked....
Gavin Bollard said…
Thanks for your comments, especially for the

Lotus\Notes\Framework

tip.

When I get enough courage up again, I'll give it a go. I found a second problem which removed the file name from any attachments on our extranet. Obviously, I couldn't live with that bug.

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