This morning my Notes 8.5 client on a Vista 64 machine refused to start. It happened conincidentally when I was installing an update to Nvidia drivers for an FX1700 card so I assumed that a roll back to the earlier driver would cure the issue. Nope !! Without an error message to go on it was frustrating to say the least.
So investigating it further showed that the client app was getting as far as the splash screen – asking for a password and then progressing the bar until it reached a 100% before disappearing off screen. An nlnotes.exe process was left behind. I tried rebooting and then killing the “hung” process but still nothing.
I renamed the cache.ndk and the desktop8.ndk files and tried starting again.
In the end I found that if I emptied the contents of the workspace folder ( which you will find under the data directory under the notes directory ) into another folder.
Lo and behold Notes starts and lets me back into the databases – and I hope this tip helps someone else