Oh No, Not Again, ActiveSync

My ActiveSync posts (e.g., ActiveSync Sit & Spin) are the most visited blog entries on this site by nearly an order of magnitude. It's clear that many others have encountered the same problems as I. ActiveSync 4.5 beta, however, was working very well for me--in fact, flawlessly. So, perhaps I should not have been so eager to upgrade to the full release. Now, my current problem could be completely coincidental with my upgrade--I'd been running 4.5 for two straight days without experiencing a any problems. However, yesterday I plugged in my Cingular 2125 WM5 SmartPhone and a dialog box popped up that read "The software you are installing for this hardware: SmartPhone USB Sync has not passed Windows Logo testing to verify its compatibility with Windows XP." (see Figure 1 below)

Figure 1: Windows Logo Testing Dialog

If you click "STOP Installation" the SmartPhone device will not be recognized by your computer; thus, you must press "Continue Anyway." In my two years of SmartPhone development, I have never seen this dialog (not sure if it is related to ActiveSync 4.5 or not). After selecting "Continue Anyway," ActiveSync opened and properly synchronized my SmartPhone. However, after unplugging the phone and plugging it in again, I received another dialog box--this one was a bit more alarming: "One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it." (see Figure 2 below)

Figure 2: USB Device Not Recognized

After this point, no amount of restarting (either my computer or device) would fix this issue. I'm not sure if Figure 2 is related to Figure 1 at all, but it seems likely. Interestingly, my other WM5 device (a Pocket PC Phone) still synchronized fine.

I was able to fix the problem by:

1. Unplugging device from computer
   
2. Uninstalling ActiveSync 4.5
3. Restarting Computer
4. Reinstalling Activesync 4.5
5. Plugging device back in

Unfortunately, it only took me about three hours to get this right. Troubleshooting included a hard reset on my SmartPhone, thus losing all of my installed programs of which there are many. I don't believe the problem is on the device side, however, so a hard reset is probably not required (in fact, after my hard reset, plugging in my device would still cause the Figure 2 dialog to pop up).