Hey George,
First off, my condolences on getting switched without any warning. When I went to Notes years ago, it was from ccMail so the switch was a little easier.

>When you press a key, you get a random number of Xs. So the first part of this is: Does anyone know how to bypass the thing? In ccMail (and in Outlook) I could supply my user name and password as command line parameters. Before I go searching for the answer in what passes for help there, does anyone know how to accomplish this in Notes?

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I believe the reaons for this is because Notes is supposed to be C2 certified (not sure but it sounds impressive -- yeah right). Anyway, it discards any keystrokes in the buffer. Notes does offer an NT integration option that will bounce your NT username and password against the ones stored in your ID file. That's the best I think you can do without writing your own integration stuff in C++ or VB using the VIM libraries.

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Also for some reason, I get prompted now and again to re-supply the password. It's made me so angry that I've forgotten to note (no pun intended) the circumstances.

This happens at many points:
1. Accesing the server for the first time.
2. Accessing the ID itself. It verifies you are you before showing you the information.
3. Automatic ID lockout. Under File - Tools - User Preferences, there is an option to lockout the ID file after some period of inactivity. Whenever the ID is locked, you must type in your password to unlock it.

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Regarding the rest of your rant, I would ask the Notes adminsitrator if they have already or will load the POP server add-on to the Notes server. Notes can act as a normal POP3 server. if they do this, you can use your Outlook 2000 to access it and most (if not all) of your headaches would go away.

HTH.