Wednesday, July 07, 2010

TIP – Another way to recover from Lotus Notes 8.5.1 replicator failure (“Unable to invoke program”)

I was just cruising along, using Lotus Notes 8.5.1 for development, and wanted to replicate a database with a client’s server.

Rather than business-as-usual replication, out spurted the error “Unable to invoke program” …

Image:Badkey Corner - Unable to invoke program and Lotus Notes

A bit of searching around the IBM support knowledgebase, various Lotus-related forums and community web sites led me nowhere.

Thee were some pretty drastic solutions, including uninstalling and re-installing Notes client, which I didn’t want to have to do. Others like this that talked about disabling the Multi-user Cleanup service (in Windows) but this didn’t apply in my case because I’m running a single-user Notes installation.

The folks at Badkey Corner had the following post: Unable to invoke program and Lotus Notes which included the advice: “Re-running client setup to generate a new names.nsf, desktop6.ndk, and bookmark.nsf resolved the issue.”

Rather than doing this (it’s a pain to delete the desktop8.ndk file because then you have to spend ages setting up your Notes Workspace again, which has lots and lots of database icons for all the applications that I work on).

It was my birthday yesterday -- and let me tell you that I’m two or three times older than many of you – but there must be a few parts of my burnt-out grey matter still working, because I got the inspiration to delete the Cache.NDK file and to my pleasure this solved the problem, as I had guessed that it might. Replication was back to normal again.

The beauty of this solution is that (a) it’s quick, and (b) you don’t lose as much as you would if you followed other suggestions. I hope that this tip works as well for you some day and saves you some sweat and tears!

6 comments:

  1. Thank you. Saved an hour or two of my day I'm sure. Worked for me.

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  2. I had the same problem. Deleting Cache.NDK didn't help. Then I deleted bookmark.nsf and this solved my problem.

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  3. My case was probably simpler: restarting Lotus notes did the trick :-)

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  4. Well sorry to say that this didn't work for me. Interestingly enough, when I log on as another user to Windows, I don't get the problem so I'm assuming this is nothing to do with c:\program files\lotus\notes... structure but part of the user's windows profile... Investigating...

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  5. Update: As this issue appeared to be Profile Specific, I ran Malwarbytes and removed Malware.. Hopefully will do the trick.

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  6. I used to delete bookmark.nsf + Cache.ndk... Today, the issue occured (LN 8.5.3 + DD+DA, single install, Win7/64) and I removed (inspired by your article) Cache.ndk only.... and it WORKED :-)!

    Thanks.

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