Wow, I thought, 72MB. I know there are a lot of fixes, but that's some incremental install. So anyway, I installed it and was a bit puzzled by seeing an InstallShield install. However, I figured that Lotus knows what they're up to. Silly me. Yes, it blew out my Help subdirectory.

At least all I lost this time was R5 Help files. I guess it blew out the modem files too, but that doesn't matter now, because I use a standard one. And it blew out my nice image for my customized Logout screen, too. And then I found it had blown out my Designer and Admin clients too, and that's when I realized that the "Incremental Installer" wasn't what I thought it was. It was actually the Notes 6.0.1 client-only full install. So I had to reinstall the old 6.0 client package.

Here are the morals I gleaned from this debacle:

• Moral 1: Don't assume that any installer is what it says it is. Check the dialogs carefully and match it with your expectations. If in doubt, don't install it.

• Moral 2: When you create a custom logout screen, go to the images section of your bookmarks.nsf with Designer and mark all your new images as "Don't allow Design Refresh/Replace to Update."

• Moral 3: Make a backup of the Notes data directory before an upgrade.

If you're already using ND6 or are just thinking about it, hopefully these little moral lessons will come in handy.

Greg Neilson is a Senior Notes Architect at a large IT services firm in Australia. He is a Contributing Editor for Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book, Lotus Domino in a Nutshell for O'Reilly (see http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/domino).