Life is too short to drink che...

Has anyone had success getting the Notes 8.5 standard config client to work when a user's data folder resides on a file server? If you use the basic configuration, all works well. However, the standard client won't open. The splash screen appears, and in task manager the notes.exe and nlnotes.exe exist, but the notes2.exe never executes. What also happens is that the lotus\notes\data\workspace\.config folder gets renamed to .configbak (why?), but a new .config folder cannot be created because it is using a / slash for the directory name (where this is coming from I haven't a clue). I am using an account with full admin rights so it's not a permissions issue.