WMDC/AS Issues… resolved for now.

WMDC/Activesync has always been a headache for most Windows Mobile users, myself included. Last week I began experiencing sync issues with my palm Treo Pro.

My device would connect fine via USB or Bluetooth, start to sync but then it would get stuck trying to sync my Calendar appointments. Since my Outlook was updated and I had good backups of my PST files I went ahead and erased partnerships on both device and PC. No joy.

I then decided to sync only Contacts, Tasks, Notes this worked but once I ticked Calendar WMDC appeared to freeze up. I also got an error message saying: An error occurred while syncing to your server blah blah blah, which was really odd because I did not use exchange sync. To make matters a bit more difficult to troubleshoot… The thing was my other device an HTC Touch3G was syncing ok with the same machine. So it was something wrong with the Treo. I did not want to do another hard reset because I had just done one a couple of weeks back. I decided to do a search for the error message and came up with forum threads of people experiencing the same problem trying different solutions and getting different results. One of the most common *fixes* (used very liberally in this case) was to uncheck EMail sync, I tried this but had no luck with it.

Then it hit me. Could it be that my PIM database was corrupted somehow? I deleted all partnerships again. Used Resco Explorer to find PIM.vol renamed it to PIM.vol.old soft reset the Treo Pro so it would create a new PIM.vol and tried to sync again. Well it worked and I now have my PIM data fully synced.

I am not entirely sure if this is a viable fix but I am tagging it under Tips n Tricks for WM anyway.

I am now re-considering moving sync to the cloud but the last time I was not all that satisfied.

Google Sync used exchange to sync Contacts to GMail and Appointments to GCalendar. Mail, Notes, Tasks were not working. Though initial sync when ok I did notice that not all my fields were being synced up to GMail. In the case of Microsoft’s MyPhone, I was syncing up 3 WM devices to 1 account this somehow caused dupes. There was no way for me to control which was followed so I had to manually delete dupes via MyPhone’s web interface, which was pretty easy but something that I shouldn’t be troubling myself with. I will probably give these *beta* services another chance soon.