[MDA II, XDA II, 2060 General] stewarta:
Syncing an XDAII PPC with Vista's WMDC

I installed Vista on a second partition and kept XP on another partition. That way I could keep my documents and the like on the XP partition and access them from either XP or VISTA. Benefits included keeping the one set of e-mail folders and content as I migrated various programs (such as PocoMail) across to Vista. And yes, they all work—and faster than my now bloated XP could handle things. I am using a 2002 ASUS A7V8X Mobo but every other component was new in 2007-08.

All went well, including synchronising my O2 XDAII Pocket PC (PPC) running SIN’s famous version of Windows Mobile 2003 SE—ROM version 2.06.00WE. I used Windows Mobile Device Centre and successfully and synced Calendar, Contacts and the like with Outlook 2007. After a couple of weeks, the PPC would no longer sync ... connect via USB, yes ... but WMDC 6.1 turned into Windows Mass Data Corruption.

Well, I tried the usual tricks that others have put forward like rolling back to WMDC 6.0, as Neville Lang suggested in the following extract wherein he:

 Uninstalled the two Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 items from the

Control Panel > Programs and Features list

 Manually deleted the contents of the C:\Windows\WindowsMobile folder.

Initially I could not delete some DLLs but once the two "Windows Mobile

device connectivity" services were stopped from the Task Manager, I was able

to delete the rest of the files in the WindowsMobile folder, except for the

en-US folder containing the *.MUI files. I could not delete them and so

decided to leave them.

 Using Regedit, deleted all entries from the following two keys that

related to my two devices:

* HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services\Partners

* HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Portable Devices\Devices (He left

in the entry for my memory card)

 Using Windows Explorer, deleted all files in the following folder:

* C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\ActiveSync\Profiles

 With his two Pocket PCs disconnected, tapped on Start > Programs >

ActiveSync > Menu > Options, highlighted the Windows PC and tapped on and

the Delete button. Both of the PPCs had two entries in here so there could

have been some confusion on the desktop at some point, so he deleted both of

them. They do not sync with any other computer.

 Rebooted (Restarted) the Windows Vista computer

 Reinstalled WMDC 6.0 from the Microsoft Download website.

 Recreated the two relationships from the two devices, and they each did

the initial long sync

 He then tested each device that it could perform a sync not long after it

was reconnected, and they both now sync perfectly. He also tested that making

any changes to some contact details in Outlook 2007 would update

But this didn’t work for me. Nor did opening specific ports in the firewall (e.g., WMDC--port 990). So I went back to WMDC 6.1 and thought about the matter. It seemed that I had done two things that might have had an effect

1) On the PC installed a VPN to a mapped drive on a work server; and

2) On the PC installed a cable line speed monitor (TCP/IQ) because I never believe the promises made by my ISP about the speed I get.

I uninstalled the line speed monitor and made sure I never connected to the VPN when trying to sync the PPC. I use SunnySoft’s BackUp Manager and so I restored a complete version of the PPC’s system and files from a few months earlier. Next I restored the current calendar etc. from the XP sync with Outlook 2003.

Next came the connect via USB with success and no more problems. I have concluded that while I think I know what went wrong, the PPC was also suffering from the aborted WMDC sync efforts. There is no way around having full backups and being able to take a few steps back to a time when all was well.

Life is good again ... for a while ....

DrGadget