I’ve been testing Windows Vista now since the early builds before they were available to the public and every time a new build would come out I’d backup all my files to DVD so I could scrub the harddrive and start again with a clean install.  Part of the backup would be to make sure my Notes ID and addressbook and any other NSF’s I have in my notes data directory would be on the DVD.

So here I am with the latest Beta 2 build ( the one that’s available to the public on the MS website ), I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it’s starting to get really slow and buggy due to all the software i’d install and uninstall for testing purposes so I decided I’m going to scrub it this weekend and I may as well copy everything to the office network as it will be faster then DVD. The first program that i install on Vista is the Lotus Notes client with the Admins and Designer clients.

I go to my C:Program FilesLotusNotesData directory and I can’t find anything, all the templates are there but no sign of my ID file and names.nsf or any other NSF. Ok, I’ll look at the notes.ini…  It only has 4 lines of text in it, it looks just as it would as if I’d done a clean install. ok, I look at the notes shortcut to see if it’s looking at a different ini file but nope, it’s pointing to the one I just looked at. I start up notes ( which loads no problem ) and look at the user preferences to see where it’s data directory is…  Guess what, it says the data directory is the one I just looked at, the one with no NSF files in it…

So what’s going on? I can’t see the files but Lotus Notes can, it must be a Vista thing.  After a load of searching I eventually found the answer.  Windows Vista introduced a new feature in the newest build called User Account Protection and one of the side effects is that it can intercept software from writing files back into the %windir% or %progfiles% directories and silently redirect the file to a different location.  When teh software goes looking for the file it sees a merged version of the two locations, when the user goes looking in explorer they just see one set of files… the wrong set.

So if your going to run Lotus Notes on Windows Vista then make sure you know that the users personal files are now stored in the c:UsersUsernameAppDataLocalVirtualStoreProgram FilesLotusNotes…

Of course another side effect of this is that each person logging into the Vista computer now will have their own set of VirtualStore files so it turns the Notes client into a MultiUser type install.