Sync is at 22 hours and counting...

[Bytor]

Good Afternoon,
I posted about this before, but we ended up letting the sync run it's course so we never seemed to get a definitive answer to this problem. I have an X51 with activesync 4.5 on an XP SP2 laptop. The system was running fairly well for some time, however yesterday morning we couldn't sync. After much troubleshooting, I upgraded AS from 4.2 to 4.5, which promptly created a new connection profile. After many hours of frustration trying to get it to sync, I ended up uninstalling AS, did a hard reset on the Axim, then re-installed AS 4.5. It now syncs and it looked like it was going beautifully, until it started syncing the e-mail attachments. I have it syncing only attachments of 1K or less (700 or so in all). It has now been syncing attachments since yesterday afternoon. The laptop has no firewall software (the XP firewall is disabled) and the AV software was disabled for the sync operation (that made no difference). I'm really at a loss as to why it would take a full day to sync less than 1MB of data. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

[Mahstah]

Hi Bytor-

Have you tried syncing with another computer? You could isolate the problem that way. Have you tried syncing without attachments? 1K isn't enough for much of anything unless it's a proof-of-concept that you can indeed sync them. What version of Outlook are you using? Have you tried a detect and repair from Outlook or a full reinstall of Office? Let us know if any of these suggestions help. Thanks,

-Mahstah

[Bytor]

Originally Posted by Mahstah

Hi Bytor-

Have you tried syncing with another computer? You could isolate the problem that way. Have you tried syncing without attachments? 1K isn't enough for much of anything unless it's a proof-of-concept that you can indeed sync them. What version of Outlook are you using? Have you tried a detect and repair from Outlook or a full reinstall of Office? Let us know if any of these suggestions help. Thanks,

-Mahstah

Hi Mastah,
Thanks for the response. I'll try to answer your questions in order.

I only have Outlook installed on one computer, my laptop. I'm not very familiar with the intricacies of WM5 and activesync, but if I do have another computer with outlook to sync to, isn't it going to create another computer account and another instance of the same e-mails?

In the course of my work, I get text files automatically mailed to me from Unix servers, the text files are very small, so 1k covers it.

I haven't tried syncing without attachments, but when I synced for the first time after the R&R, it completed the e-mails properly, but started bogging down when it started on the attachments.

I'm using outlook 2003

I did try detect and repair, but not a complete re-install of Office. The last time we had to go through this, I reinstalled office completely.

When you sync e-mail with attachments, how long does it take you? I really dont believe that it can take over 1 minute per attachment (we timed it) to simply transfer a small file. The connection is USB 2, so the bottleneck cant be the physical connection. It might help me if I knew how long it takes for a *normal* setup to sync attachments.

Thanks for the help on this!

[Drifter]

I'm syncing regularly within approx 5 mins. If I hard reset my X51v, the resync takes about 30-45 mins to resync 360 days of data in all categories.

You have mentioned firewall, but do you have anything like spybot, Counterspy or even windows onecare installed ???. These programs block connection isn a way that sometimes it just look like the connection is for ever when actually it is waiting for an action from the user.

I've also seen similar problems if an unsafe email is included or if the internal memory of the Axim is nearly full. Check to see if all programs are stopped on the AX before trying to sync as these do take up available memory and it is easy to exit a program but leave it running in the back ground

[Bytor]

Originally Posted by Drifter

I'm syncing regularly within approx 5 mins. If I hard reset my X51v, the resync takes about 30-45 mins to resync 360 days of data in all categories.

You have mentioned firewall, but do you have anything like spybot, Counterspy or even windows onecare installed ???. These programs block connection isn a way that sometimes it just look like the connection is for ever when actually it is waiting for an action from the user.

I've also seen similar problems if an unsafe email is included or if the internal memory of the Axim is nearly full. Check to see if all programs are stopped on the AX before trying to sync as these do take up available memory and it is easy to exit a program but leave it running in the back ground

Hi Drifter,
Thanks for responding.

I do have MS Defender installed, I have to admit I haven't tried disabling it, but I will try that out and let you know if it helps.

The Axim is really only used for e-mail, but the next time I sync, I'll check the programs that are running and see what's there.

I also have a correction to my original post, the size of the attachments was set to 100K or less, not 1K, I must not have set it properly. This means that the maximum data being sync'ed is 70MB. This is obviously much larger than originally estimated, but given that you can sync a whole years worth of data in 45 minutes, it still seems that something is not right.

Thanks for the tips, I'll post back with anything I find out.

[Bytor]

Well, we've tried everything suggested. We disabled Windows Defender, AVG AV, Windows Firewall, and made sure that there were no other running programs on the Axim. Now, when we Sync, we get error 86000209. I've done a soft reset of the Axim and tried restarting the sync, but it still errors out. On the rare occasion it does sync, it still takes forever. I have disabled syncing the attachments for now, but it has had no effect. Can anyone suggest my next step? I'm getting really discouraged with this, I cant believe this basic fucntion should be causing me this much trouble.

Help!

[Mahstah]

1. Try deselecting email sync in ActiveSync on your PC, hitting OK, then reselecting it
2. Try Help-Detect and Repair from Outlook on your PC
3. Try deleting your ActiveSync profile on both the PC and the PDA

[Bytor]

Originally Posted by Mahstah

1. Try deselecting email sync in ActiveSync on your PC, hitting OK, then reselecting it
2. Try Help-Detect and Repair from Outlook on your PC
3. Try deleting your ActiveSync profile on both the PC and the PDA

I tried detect and repair yesterday. Afterwards, it failed 3 times then finally started syncing. Because I had told it to no longer sync attachments, it literally deleted all the e-mail from the axim, then reloaded it.

I'll try the other two things you suggest Mahastah.

Thanks for the help.