Sandy called to say she was having trouble deleting a Group To Do. Thinking she was just having a bad day, I opened her mailfile as the Notes Admin.

She had six To Dos. She wanted to delete three repeating Group To Dos. I selected one of them and pressed the Delete button. Nothing happened. There was no error message and the To Do was still there.

I checked the Access Control List wondering if somehow my rights on the file had changed. Both Sandy and the Notes Admin ID were still listed as Managers with Delete rights. I told her I'd find a fix, but for now I was baffled.

I ran the usual, Fixup, Updall and Compact -c, but the To Dos were still there. Then I checked the file properties looking for something out of the ordinary. Finally I pulled a Notes copy of Sandy's file to my desktop, hoping that whatever corruption was causing the problem would be cleaned out.

Now that I had a local copy of the mailfile with To Dos that still wouldn't go away, I started experimenting. I held down the Ctrl and Shift keys while opening the file to see the hidden views. I was surprised to see that To Dos, unlike calendar entries, still looked like To Dos. And they still wouldn't delete. I could make copies of the problem items, but that just left me with even more entries that wouldn't go away.

Notes.net had a few postings on the subject, going back several years, but none of the suggestions seemed to help. Even deleting the To Do from the All Documents view failed to remove it from the To Do page in Sandy's file.

Having exhausted my bag of tricks, I called Lotus Support. The tech was as bafffled as I. Thankfully, he had more resources to call on. He was willing to help me experiment since the Technote talked about calendar entries but didn't mention To Dos.

Following his instructions, I opened the copy of Sandy's file in the Designer Client and went down to Shared Code, Agents. The tech told me to create a new, Shared agent and leave the type as "Simple Action". So far, it was simple enough for a non-programmer like me. Then he had me select the action "Delete from database" and save the agent. I stared at the phone in disbelief. That was it? The response was something like, "Let's find out".

Not really believing the fix could be so simple, I opened the file in the Notes client and went to To Dos. I highlighted the first Group To Do that refused to be deleted and selected the new agent from the Actions menu. The To Do was gone! I deleted a second stubborn To Do just to be sure I hadn't imagined the first deletion. Then I copied the new agent into Sandy's file so she could delete what she wanted.

Sandy thinks I'm a hero. I think the Lotus tech deserves the credit. I hope he added a line to the Technote saying the fix works on To Dos too.

DominoPower Contributing Editor Nancy Hand is primary Notes admin at a remote site for a large corporation. She earned both Novell and Microsoft certifications in network engineering before being introduced to Lotus Notes. The 3,000 users she supports constantly challenge Nancy to keep up with their creative missteps. With a background in art, she brings a different perspective to working with computers and their users. In the past, Nancy has worked in the fields of accounting, criminal justice, and museum display. To balance the challenges of the job, she continues to draw and sculpt between stabs at writing novels and designing knitware.