How to kill the Lotus Notes 5 splash screen the hard way






The splash-screen Lotus is showing us when starting Notes, 
is not only very annoying, it is also slowing down a terminal 
server session beyond acceptable start-up times.
One way to overcome this is using nlnotes.exe to start Notes,
but this has the disadvantage that new instances of Notes 
will be started each time when clicking the icon. Besides 
that, activating Notes trough a HTTP “mailto:” label, via MAPI
or trough the NotesMinders will still show the splash-screen.

Tired of watching the splash-screen being build line for line
again, I found a way to kill the annoying screen THE  HARD WAY.
All you need is a hex editor (i.e. UtraEdit) to set the splash
screen bitmap dimensions to zero and you are done (make a copy
of notes.exe first).

In R5 the splash-screen resolution is 425 x 328; so searching the 
notes.exe file for the hex-dword representation of this 
resolution [A9 01 00 00 48 01 00 00] will take you directly to
the right spot. Change the resolution to all zero’s 
[00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00] and save the file. This should do the
trick. I tested this on Notes 5.02 Dutch and 5.03 Uk; both work.

Note: In R6 you should look for [04 02 00 00 86 01 00 00] inside
notes.exe or notes.exe.mui (in subfolder mui\....\notes.exe.mui).
Where .... is the same as the UserInterface setting in notes.ini