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How to resolve the Mac Notes 8.5 Crash after installing Fusion 2 Beta 2

Tags : VMWare Fusion Notes 8.5 Beta Software NSD Right Click Crash Eclipse
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After installing VMWare Fusion 2 Beta 2 my Lotus Notes 8.5 Public Beta 1 client started crashing. A LOT. Most notably when you right click on anything or click on any of the action bar buttons that would drop down a menu of options. I don't know about you but I right click on a lot of things in the notes client so having it crash and perform an NSD every few minutes just wasn't very productive at all so I decided to see if I could figure out what was going wrong.

Heres what I found...
I started by reading the NSD files that was generated by the client but I could not find anything useful at all. Then I have a look in the Eclipse CrashReporter logs. On the mac these are stored in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and the latest crash report showed a few things I could start looking into. The most important line that stood out to me was the last executed java command that started with : org.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.OS.ContextualMenuSelect

ContextualMenu... That's just another name for the menu that pops up when you right click on something and as the notes client seems to crash when you right click anywhere it's a good starting point.

Google didn't return many hits for the full string but the hit that it did come back with was a thread on an Eclipse development forum where somebody was talking about slow contextual menus. After reading the tread a bit it was mentioned that some software had installed a Contextual Menu Item on the mac and this is what was causing their right click menus to be slow.

So I decided to have a look at the directory they mentioned ( /Library/Contexual Menu Items ) and spotted a single file called FusionVMDKPlugIn.plugin that had just been installed by the new VMWare Fusion 2 Beta 2 software.  I made sure both Notes and Fusion were not running and then I moved that file out of the directory and restarted Lotus Notes. Bingo, I could right click in my Notes Client again.

Researching into this file I believe that I can safely delete it permanently until VMWare have resolved the problem. It looks like it is a simple extention to the right click menu in Mac OS X so if you click on a VMWare image a new menu option will appear to allow you to mount the VMWare image as a drive in the Mac OS.

So if you are experiencing this issue in Notes 8.5 Public Beta 1 and you have VMWare Fusion 2 Beta 2 installed you now know how to fix the issue.

I have also opened a bug report with VMWare on this issue so hopefully it will be resolved in the final release.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Thanks for posting your solution. This was driving me insane.

Gravatar Image2 - Thanks! Great work on the debugging!

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