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lotus-notes

After updating Notes client / designer help navigator is broken

Last week I tried to update my Notes client installation from 9.0.1 FP9 to FP10 IF 3. For technical reasons I had to roll back which proved to be quite difficult, and I ended up completely uninstalling Notes and doing a fresh installation of 9.0.1 (standard) then FP9 IF 2.

Everything's fine (and much more responsive than before, too) with one serious exception:

Within the client help popup window for Notes client and Domino Designer help is hardly usable now; obviously there's no CSS style or whatever applied to the nav page / frame:

screenshot of help window

As you can see in the screenshot styling of the main window part (green frame) is fine. But everything that is releated to navigation (red frames) appears to be raw html. Javascript calls are apparently working but it's really hard to navigate the "chapters". Same applies to Designer help, of course.

Here's what I tried to solve that riddle:

  • uninstalled and re-installed full client 3 times; sometimes I ran the installation as local Admin other times I didn't (no difference)
  • just installed plain Notes 9.0.1 from scratch then tested Client help before updating to FP9IF2 (no difference)
  • restored the entire [Notes-Programm]\framework directory from a backup I took when Notes help still was working as expected (no difference)
  • copied over the entire \Notes\ folder from a different PC where popup help is still working fine (no difference)

Problem with that is: being a Developer I need to have a functioning help window in my Domino Designer. The navigator as it is right now however is plain useless. And designer_help.nsf isn't of help at all when it comes to Java, LotusScript etc. objects and classes.

One of my co-workers has the same phenomenon while another one hasn't.

Question: did anyone else experience something like that? Where you able to solve it? How?

Solution

  • Meanwhile I restored my entire Windows system partition from a backup created just before all that began (lucky me that I have both regular local backups plus a separate system partition). And that finally helped resolve the problem.

    Meanwhile I'm 99% sure that this is due to a rather new registry and/or firewall setting not yet known to IBM's NICE tool.