[8125, K-JAM, P4300, MDA Vario General] wolfbbg:
Hi Gang:

I have recently been trying to solve a puzzling issue that I was experiencing with my 8125, and I wanted to share the problem and (partial) solution with everyone in case this ever crops up again. I did pretty extensive searches here (and elsewhere), and could not find a single case of this problem happening to someone else. I tried every combination of search terms that I could think of...

Description: 8125 Freezing or Slow Down Upon Attempted Access of Phone Settings or other settings icons

Background: My (heavily-customized/optimized) 8125 had been stable for weeks, with no significant "upgrades" for over a month. Then I upgraded to MS VC 1.6. A few days after this upgrade, my phone got quite wonky (e.g. alarm going off non-stop, etc.) due to the notification queue getting clogged. I don't know if this is the fault of MS VC or not, though. Thanks to Memmaid & CheckNotifications, I cleared out the queue. At this time the phone appeared to be functioning normally.

A few days later, I tried to access the phone settings to manually select the network provider (traveling internationally). However, regardless of which route I would take to access the phone settings, the phone would freeze, quit responding, or greatly slow down. A soft reset was necessary to "un-freeze" the phone. Also, even if I tried to access other icons (e.g. Sounds & Notifications, when clicking on the Notification tab) under Start/Settings, the phone would quit responding.

Corrective Steps:

I initially worked the smartphone support folks in my employer's IT dept & Cingular tech support. Neither group was aware of this being a regular problem with the 8125.

1.	Multiple soft resets – no help

2.	Multiple hard resets – no help

3.	Cingular replaced my 8125 – no help

4.	Multiple hard resets of phone #2 – no help

5.	Got a new SIM card – no help, but met a new Cingular tech

6.	Hard reset** of new phone + new SIM card = OK

** Everything working OK now, with this "special" hard reset. During the setup procedure, I skipped the password setting screen, then let the phone unpack the ROM. In all previous attempts, I had enabled this password during setup (company policy, can't sync to Exchange server w/o it). According to the new Cingular tech that I met while getting my new SIM card, having this password set before the ROM is unpacked can "corrupt" the ROM unpacking. I don't know how true this last point is, but it sounded reasonable -- and it worked.

Next, I synced the phone (via USB) – guess what? The problem was back! Sooo, another hard reset and I decided to sync via EDGE first (i.e. email,calendar,contacts,& tasks only). The phone was still working!

After inspecting the ActiveSync settings on my PC, I noticed that I was not only sync'ing the 4 items above (from the Exchange server), but also "Notes" from my PC. This had to be the problem, so I disabled the sync'ing of Notes.

THE PHONE STILL WORKED AFTER A USB SYNC!! :D

Apparently there was some conflict related to the sync'ing of notes that was corrupting a key system file on the phone. Not sure what the root cause was, but by disabling the Notes sync the phone is working great again. I know this was a bit long-winded, but hopefully it will help someone in the future.

Of course, if someone has any ideas about how I might be able to reliably sync notes again, I would love to hear 'em. For now, I am doing without.

regards,

bg