In the process of trying to make the company's backup process suck data off my laptop and put it somewhere safe,. the notes.ini file that holds all the configuration data for Notes got zapped to a zero-length file.    It's like having someone park so close to your car that you can't get the  door open.  everything's THERE, you just can't get to it.

Spun my wheels for two hours until someone else came in to work.  She mailed her ini file to my outside mail account, and once I had something to work with, I was able to get Notes back without losing eight years of saved data.

I never did get the backup software to work. it was hanging on a half-hour to copy an 800k .jpg file, and confidently told me it would be five days until my backup was complete.  I just hope notes.ini was the ONLY file that got zapped.
 
So, be sure to back up your data, folks.  To a stack of CDs that you can keep in your desk.