As previously reported, Windows XP with Service Pack 3 has a nasty tendency to cause people to be unable to uninstall software such as Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8.
What I didn’t know, was that it doesn’t confine itself to blocking uninstall of these programs, but that it also blocks the uninstall of, for example, Lotus Notes.
I even got an error message; this one, to be exact: “The Windows Installer Service Could Not Be Accessed”
It would seem that Service Pack 3 actually blocks software from accessing the Windows Installer Service. The solution, then, is to uninstall Service Pack 3. After I did that, I could uninstall Lotus Notes.
Category: Lotus Notes
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Windows XP SP3 blocks uninstall of software
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Lotus Notes: Resolve "Type mismatch" error
I recently had a user call inn to report that whenever she tried to delete an invitation to a meeting, she got this error:
The invitation in question would get an X beside it, and delete when she refreshed her screen.
The solution is luckily simpler than the error message could lead us to believe; a simple change to the preferences is all that is needed:
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Lotus Notes: Notes automatically deletes email
A while back, a user called in, telling me that he had lost a lot of important email. All of the emails he lost were roughly three months old, and he’d lost all of his emails that were older than three months.
The cause of this problem was that the user had set a flag in his Replication settings, instructing Notes to delete emails older than 90 days. After removing this flag, the user no longer had this problem:
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Lotus Notes: Resolving "You are not authorized to use the server" errors
The error message “You are not authorized to use the server” is caused by the user being entered into the Deny list. When this error message is displayed, the administrator of the Deny list will have to change the permissions of the user in question.
Edit: A commenter commented that I’d got it wrong, so I’ve now corrected it. -
Lotus Notes: Resolving "File truncated – file may have been damaged" errors
The error message “File truncated – file may have been damaged” is most often seen server-side, but every once in a while it will turn up on client computers, especially where Notes is installed on a network share (not a good idea) and synchronised to the local machine through offline folders. -
Lotus Notes: "Invalid or non-existent document"
As I have noted earlier, Lotus Notes is not famous for having easily understandable error-messages, quite the opposite in fact. However, when you think a bit about it; some messages are clearer than others. An example of this is the “Invalid or non-existent document” error.
The problem in this case is that an entry in an NSF-file (a document in a database) is corrupt. This can happen for various reasons. There are two ways to fix the problem, one server-side, and one client-side.
Server-side
On the server console, run the commandload fixup %NAME OF DATABASE%
This will remove the faulting documents from the index and from the database
Client-side
Some databases can be replaced client-side (basically any databases located in the Data catalog of Notes). To replace them, simply rename the file, then start Notes. Notes will then recreate the file from the .ntf. NOTE: This will delete any and all entries in the database. -
Lotus Notes – Resolving "Illegal Circular USE" errors
A client of mine called me up, saying she had a problem with Lotus Notes. She had recently upgraded from Lotus Notes version 5 to Lotus Notes version 6, and now got a lot of error messages every time she opened just about anything, really. The error message she received said: “Illegal circular USE: DocumentConversions”.
As it turns out, the solution is pretty straight forward. The problem is that the design of the users’ mailfile is outdated. All you need to do is update it to the design for Lotus Notes version 6, and off you go. -
Resolving "An Error Was Encountered While Opening A Window" errors
Lotus Notes has a plethora of more or less (usually the latter) legible and understandable error messages. One of them I encountered the other day. The situation is as follows: a client of mine told me Notes had crashed, and she was now unable to restart Notes due to a rather cryptic error message: “An Error Was Encountered While Opening A Window”.
Now if we only knew why. The problem, it turns out, is that a process called NTASKLDR is still running. Knowing this, we also know how to resolve the problem. The solution is to kill the process called NTASKLDR. Open the task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, open the processes tab, find the process and end it. -
Sametime: Resolving "There was an error opening a chat session…" errors
I recently encountered the following error message when trying to initiate a chat session with a colleague.
Apparently, the error “0x80000005” means “The element is non-existent”. What happens is that when I tried to initialize a chat with my colleague, the Sametime client tries to open a Sametime channel to this user. It seems this is so rare an occurrence, the client hasn’t been programmed with a proper error message.
Luckily, the problem is resolved fairly easily. Logging off and on Sametime has resolved the problem for me. -
Lotus Notes 8 – ‘A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug?’
I’ve had a few cases of users running into this error message in Lotus Notes 8.0.1:
The problem is tied to the embedded version of IBM’s instant messaging system Sametime, and has been reliably reproduced in any of the following conditions:
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Syncronising Lotus Notes Calendar with Google Calendar
At work, I use IBM’s Lotus Notes as my primary email and calendar client. It works well enough, but there are some issues. My main problem with it though, is that syncronising calendar data with Google Calendar is nigh on impossible, at least out of the box.
Finding this annoying, I talked to a colleague of mine, and asked him if he had any clues as to third party software that could solve my problem. The answer he came up with turned out to be the very thing I’d been looking for. The app is made by a company called CompanionLink Software, and is called Companionlink for Google.
The program is available as a 14 day free evaluation, after that it costs $29,95. Frankly, just under 30 bucks for this piece of software is pretty cheap. It is easy to use, and it just works.
CompanionLink supports the following PIMs:
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