Lotus Notes Client troubleshooting – 7 How-To – Rebuild the Lotus Notes Client

This How-To is part of the series of Lotus Notes Troubleshooting documents, Part 7 Notes.ini

In this post we completely rebuild the whole Lotus Notes client. This is possibly the last troubleshooting action you can perform before re-installing it. Therefore, make sure what you are doing and that all important configuration files, are saved somewhere. (test this first to see if this works well in your environment!)

• Right click anywhere on the desktop and select new folder, name the folder backup.
• Click on start search for files or folders and search for the following files:

NAMES.NSF, DESKTOP5.DSK or DESKTOP6.NDK and NOTES.INI

Then hold control and select all of the files and select edit and copy to folder, browse to the backup folder and click ok.

• Then select these files, (except the notes.ini) in the original notes data folder and delete them, double click on Notes.ini file and delete all the text except for the first three lines: [notes], directory: c:\documents and settings\your name\ my documents\lotus\notes\data, and KIT TYPE = 1

Then select file and save.

• Now restart lotus notes. You will receive the following screen click on next.

The steps you’ll have to take from now on are those of a standard new set-up. So make sure you have the name of the user, and the location of his or her mail-file.

(Screenshot from a Lotus Notes V. 5 Client. This screen displays up till version 7)

• The next screen will prompt you for your name and domino server you would like to connect to. Fill in the full name of the user, eg. k, and untick the box next to I want to connect to a domino server
• Now you will be prompted for the Lotus Sametime credentials. Here fill in the details.
• Click next and in the screen that appears you will be asked for any other services you can have notes connect to (Internet mail, Newsgroups, proxies, etc) Usually none of these are being used.
• you now have Lotus notes ready for use, we can add back in the address book and the desktop icons by selecting them in the backup folder, names.nsf & desktop5.dsk and copy to folder lotus\notes\data overwriting the files that the client recreated.

DISCLAIMER: Be aware that these documents are made from information found online, and experience in a large corporation. This means that the situation you will have to apply this to might be quite different.

The idea behind this however, is to make you acquainted with the most common processes and inner workings of the software

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