Ideally, this would be incorporated in the notes.exe or nlnotes.exe as one of the first tasks. It would figure out the difference between "these processes are there because Notes is already running" and "these processes are left over from a crash."

This is one of the many things that the Eclipse client took away -- the loss of which was, IMO, a grievous error on the client development team's part. I agree beyond whole-heartedly that this self-management of child processes should return, but I fear that if it could be coded into the eclipse-based client, it would have been from the start.

No need for something like ZapNotes these days. Add a shortcut to:
C:\lotus\notes\nsd.exe -kill

Brian I think you are missing the point here. It should all be invisible to the end-user.

Worse, is now with the ND8 client, you have non-Notes processes that need to be managed. I train my admins on always grabbing, "eclipse.exe", "soffice.exe", and all the n*.exe processes. If any of these are open, Notes will cease to start.

Also interesting is that you will have multiple eclipse.exe files when you are launching a separate ST8 Connect client...so be careful as to which eclipse.exe you choose to kill.

I agree with The Turtle. When Notes is launched it should be able to check to see if the currently running tasks are orphaned. If so, it should kill them. Well, it should at least just ask you if Notes is *really* running. If you choose no, then kill all the tasks.

ntmulti.exe is the one that I've found usually runs and causes the most pain since it's a service and the zapper programs usually don't kill.

@Bill - if you get the admins to rt-click notes2w.exe and choose "End Process Tree", then this should kill everything, including the proper eclipse.exe (except for soffice). You'll get the lovely grey eclipse screen that you'll have to click on and press Enter (if the OK button is way down at the bottom - lovely ui!). hth

A client crash in 8.0.1 shuts down all processes in an orderly fashion. You simply have to wait for the crash manager to complete.

So, this request has already be fulfilled in the current release of the product.

801 seems to do this, as long as you let it finish like Nathan says. You can't cancel the NSD / eclipse bug thingy. Let is happen and it will close the processes.

Of course, the need for it means there is a bug. So can we have an idea entitled "no bugs in Notes please" ... LOL

If somebody can truly verify this feature in 8.0.1 then we can close this idea. Any takers?

What I meant to say is Nathan is there any documentation on this?

I am using 8.5 designer and I must disappoint you all, there are situations that Notes crashes and that there are still notes-task hanging around. What makes it worse, is that restarting Eclipse just hangs and in the beginning you have no clue what the reason is. So you abort Eclipse and do it over again. This results in even more notes-tasks.

I understand that 8.5 is still in Beta, but I doubt if they will be able to fix this.

@10 - I don't understand what kind of documentation you would want. The process is automatic. If you are running Notes 8.0.1, and it crashes, the NSD process says "hey, we see you crashed... hang on while we get information about what was happening at the time so we can send it back to IBM." If you let that process complete, and don't click "cancel" on the dialog that pops up, it cleans up all the tasks.

@11 - A test in 8.5, which is not GA code, means absolutely nothing. If you have specific reproducable instances where the current gold release of Notes crashes, and then fails to clean up, I'd love to hear them. And I'm sure so would Silvia Pighin or Jan Kenney, the managers of the beta programs that you must be a part of in order to be running 8.5 Designer.

Please note that in all cases, killing the process that cleans up errant processes means.... you guessed it.... you still have errant processes. That seems pretty obvious on the face of it.

@12 - Nathan, my experience is that 8.0 an 8.0.1 *do* clean up *if* I see the NSD crash-statistics-gatherer application. However, often when I see the enormous error dialog box, sub-tasks *are* left in the memory. Since I know what tasks to kill, I'm often able to perform a successful restart. But an *end user* have no idea, and shouldn't have either, on how to do this.

@13 - Then, sir, your experience is substantially different from mine. I haven't had to kill individual Notes processes except by my own choice for the last 18 months.

If there are specific crashes that do not activate the NSD clean up in the Notes Standard client, I'd love to hear them. The only time I've ever been able to crash the Eclipes client independent of the underlying Notes basic tasks was when I was mucking around with SWT plugin code that was specifically doing stress-test thread jumping. Otherwise, in my experience (which is 10 hours a day of Notes coding for at least 6 days a week for the last year and a half,) I can only squeeze a crash out of the Notes basic tasks, and the NSD cleanup process always does its job flawlessly.

@13 - He he, does that mean that you never have seen the Eclipse-like error dialog box? I also code the whole day long, and I would say that I have this problem perhaps 1-2 times a week. This ideaJam-idea came up when I just had another one.

@14 - Wow, that's an amazing run there. I have had a substantially different experience, not horrible, but I'd say once a week I get a nice crash that gives me the HUGE eclipse dialog and leaves N* processes running.

Maybe there's some code in there like
If userID contains ucase("FREEMAN") or ucase("HEAD").....

To clarify, I've gotten the huge Eclipse error box plenty of times. And every time, it's been AFTER the NSD task has cleaned up my errant processes. As long as when NSD starts and says "Lotus Notes has encountered an error," you *don't* click Cancel, then for me, it always closes what it needs to close so that I can restart the client.

So what happens if the NDS task is never done? I've tried being patient and letting it runs its course, but considering it's essentially just logging a load of stuff about memory and task state, it seems to take an awful long time to finish. So much so, that often I can't be bothered to let it continue—5+ minutes is WAY too long IMHO.

On the plus side, in OS X Notes just... disappears. And doesn't seem to leave anything behind part from the usual ~.lck file :o)

I've had to run c:\program files\IBM\lotus\notes\nsd.exe -kill on 8.0 and 8.01 lots of times. So much so, that I don't use my 8.01 client as my primary admin machine. I still use a 6.5.6 machine as my main machine and 8.01 (now 8.5 beta 1) is sitting next to me.

There were times when I just left 8.01 to crash and itself down overnight. I've never had the experience that it cleaned itself up properly.

Anyone using 8.02 yet? It gets worse! Arghhhhh OK it definitely loads up faster but now not even "nsd.exe -kill" works when it hangs! Only a computer restart works. I've had occasional luck killing eclipse.exe +child processes, restarting Notes, killing eclipse again (several times) then it randomly starts working again. At least they could add that to the help! :P

UPDATE: HOW TO GET NOTES 8.02 (Frankenstein edition) back to life:

1. From a command prompt, Run "NSD.EXE -kill" (found in the Notes Program directory) OR right-click on eclipse.exe in Task Manager and select End Process Tree.
2. From the Notes Program directory, run admin.exe. Your Admin Client will load up from where you can then successfully launch the Notes client (ie from the left-hand bookmark bar).

My experimentation leads me to believe that it's that darn old desktop.nsk file. When it gets corrupted it can really bring the curtain down. I can reliably cause Notes to crash by attempting to bring up the InfoBox of a workspace tile who's database no longer exists. Notes asks if you want to remove the tile then promptly crashes whatever you answer.

SO... this work-around works at least in this scenario!

Don't want to wait for error reporting to finish, not going to send in error report anyway. Click Cancel, run ZapNotes. Wait and run ZN again (because it often misses things). Still quicker than waiting for the error report.

6.5-7-8.0.2 it still spending my users support time, sad, very sad

As of 8.5.1 I'm pretty happy with the thoroughness of the post-crash cleanup.