Sync Error (0xE4010646) for OneNote Notebooks on Sharepoint 2010

Question

Environment:

We have SP 2010 and Office 2010 products.

Problem:

Our OneNote notebooks that are stored on SP started to get error 0xE4010646 on 11-18-11 and would not sync any new information. Note that previous to that Friday, we were having absolutely no sync errors throughout our environment. We have had fingers in our SP environment so there -may- have had some changes that we can't easily chase down. I can capture Event logs for you to sift through if you think it will help.

Troubleshooting steps & updates/changes:

After trying many things (creating new notebooks, new libraries, etc.) with no success, we started looking at Microsoft updates. There had been no Office updates to our machines since around 11-8-11 when update KB2553290 was installed for OneNote. Just to test, we tried checking a machine that hadn't been updated since before that and we were able to sync notebooks.

Following this lead, we uninstalled update KB2553290 on all our client machines and tried clearing the OneNote cache and synchronizing the notebooks from scratch. This only worked for SOME notebooks and not others - it depended on the OneNote location in Sharepoint. For example, our IT site collection root site works, but the root site collection root site doesn't work.

To test, we tried the following combinations of new notebook creation in sharepoint (Root site collection):

• Existing onenote library & new notebook : sync fail
• New onenote library & new notebook : sync fail
• New subsite (same perms, features), new onenote library & new notebook : sync success(!)

Curiously, now we have some notebooks that sync and some that don't, but none of them ever "finish" the sync. The first time you open them they sync completely with a Sync progress "Up to date" with a checkmark, but after some time (reboot, probably) and making edits & syncing the notebooks, the notebooks sync information, but the progress instead displays "Waiting for update. Last update (very close to current time)" We can see each others edits, so it does seem to be syncing correctly.. just never gets the green checkmark & Up to date status.

So, it seems the only way we can work around this problem is by making the following changes/compromises:

1. Find a suitable location in sharepoint that has the capability of successful sync currently (note: our root site collection, root site is not working)
2. Ensure KB2553290 is uninstalled on the client machine
3. Delete the cache of the notebook (force a fresh sync of the entire notebook)
4. Ignore the fact that sync never finishes (displays 'waiting for update' & never shows the checkmark/"Up to date" status)

Regarding #1, we are considering making a dedicated "Notebooks" site collection.

Definitely NOT ideal. Any ideas or other fix suggestions would be extremely helpful.

Answer 1

1. Run the following from the Start Search box: ONENOTE.EXE /SafeBoot
2. Click on the Clear Cache button

WARNING: Any changes not synchronized to SharePoint will be lost.

You can open the backup to recover the lost information but it will need to be manually reconciled in the new local copy of the notebook.