The 3 biggest "pain points" we are investigating

OneNote 2007 has been out for over a year, we've shipped our first service pack for it and have had overall very positive comments sent our way from many people who have used OneNote. Thanks!

It's not all sunshine, though, as a few shadows have been reported. Based on postings on various websites (like our newsgroup, or even this blog), bug reports, product support feedback and internal usage, we've identified three areas which are problems for OneNote users.

In no particular order, they are:

1. Sometimes addins such as the powertoys we've released stop working. The symptom is usually a toolbar icon "goes gray" when clicked. I've seen this once, and by the time I got everything installed on my home computer to debug the thing, it started working. We know the problem exists but have not been able to force it to happen so isolating it has been quite difficult. The best we can do so far is the to recommend this workaround:

  1. Exit Onenote and wait 15 minutes (or restart the computer, or, if you want, use Task Manager to kill dllhost.exe)
  2. Uninstall the addin
  3. Go to control panel and open Programs (or Add/Remove programs). Open the Office 2007 install and check to ensure .NET programmability is installed under OneNote
  4. clip_image001
  5. Re-run setup for the addin. On Vista, ensure you are an admin, or run under administrator rights.
  6. Try again.

The good news is this generally works. The bad news is it is not 100% guaranteed, and you may have to repeat the process a few times.

2. The OneNote printer gets removed. Dan Escapa wrote a good summary and posted a workaround here: https://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2008/02/06/how-to-fix-missing-printer-icon.aspx

3. The OneNote tray icon (technically, the OneNote screen clipper and launcher process, onenotem.exe) disappears. This at least has an easy workaround which has worked 100% of the time: in tools \ options \ other, toggle the setting to show the icon OFF, save the setting, then toggle it back ON. We are still trying to track down why the process ends and gets turned off.

From a test point of view, the 3rd item is the most frustrating to troubleshoot. No one usually notices the onenotem process is gone until trying to use the WINDOWS+S key to capture a screen clipping. By then, the cause of the problem has already passed and we are left with precious little information to isolate the reason for the behavior.

The test team is working on these problems and I hope to have some good news as we continue investigating.

Questions, concerns, comments and criticism always welcome,

John