In a previous article I mentioned a circumstance where the Lotus Notes client would not start. I came across a variation of this which might be of use if you find that the client loads – asks for password and then stays loading forever. Normally this would simply be a matter of renaming the workspace folder but in this particular instance I was getting a message that I could not rename the folder because a file in it was in use by another program.
Normally a reboot would clear that but I found that it wasn’t. I temporarily disabled the single logon service and killed the notes client process notes and nlnotes but still it wouldn’t left me rename the folder. I noticed that if I killed the Open Office process that related to notes (soffice) and the nsd process I could actually make the name of the folder change and then restart notes.
So if you are faced with the “loading” forever message – try renaming the workspace folder. If you get errors about the folder being in use – make sure all the process using it are killed (even after a reboot). The version of Notes in question was 8.5.3.