Carlos
2nd September 2003, 11:37 PM
It's been a long five days in my recent Pocket PC history. It's a very long story, but I'll make it as short as possible. Last Thursday my XDA got so ridiculously slow it was unusable. It would take 5-10 seconds to pull down the start menu, 15 seconds to launch most apps, 20 seconds to show the phone and another 10 to dial, etc. It would take anywhere from 2-5 minutes to soft reset. Often it would just lock up totally either while being used or while resetting.
I started by removing recently-loaded apps, which didn't help. I tried lots of common and not-so-common troubleshooting steps. No joy. I finally did a hard reset, and restored a 5-day-old backup. Everything was fine.
Unfortunately, this is where much time was wasted because the problem hid itself. I would drop the device in the cradle and load one app to test, and it would kill it. To the point where many times it would not reset at all, hanging on the boot screen (I let it sit for 30 minutes once, just hung there).
Since this happened with several apps, I was quite perplexed. I wasted a lot of troubleshooting time. Finally after wasting many hours I thought it might be related to sync files, so I turned those off. No joy, but at least now I narrowed it down that the problem would happen with just a sync and no loaded apps.
I kept narrowing down the sync items until it became apparent it was something in the calendar. After much messing around, I seemed to have resolved it. No more hanging, and I could sync the calendar. Until I added a new calendar item, and killed the device again.
This time I tried copying the calendar to a temp PST file and then tried to open that. Hung Outlook every time. Around this time I also noticed some calendar items had disappeared from the desktop, but not the PPC. Damn. I started deleting all the calendar items via the category view. Hung Outlook. Narrowed it down finally to one birthday item that apparently was corrupt. I was finally able to delete that after many attempts in different ways. The crazy thing is that all of the calendar items came back from the PPC on the first sync, including the corrupt item, and still everything is fine.
Now I'm back to normal, and can add items. What a mess. I wasted around 10-12 hours fixing this.
Note that I tried the scanpst.exe repair utility, which found nothing wrong with the PST file. Also the hangs occurred in both Outlook XP and 2000, on two different machines.
I started by removing recently-loaded apps, which didn't help. I tried lots of common and not-so-common troubleshooting steps. No joy. I finally did a hard reset, and restored a 5-day-old backup. Everything was fine.
Unfortunately, this is where much time was wasted because the problem hid itself. I would drop the device in the cradle and load one app to test, and it would kill it. To the point where many times it would not reset at all, hanging on the boot screen (I let it sit for 30 minutes once, just hung there).
Since this happened with several apps, I was quite perplexed. I wasted a lot of troubleshooting time. Finally after wasting many hours I thought it might be related to sync files, so I turned those off. No joy, but at least now I narrowed it down that the problem would happen with just a sync and no loaded apps.
I kept narrowing down the sync items until it became apparent it was something in the calendar. After much messing around, I seemed to have resolved it. No more hanging, and I could sync the calendar. Until I added a new calendar item, and killed the device again.
This time I tried copying the calendar to a temp PST file and then tried to open that. Hung Outlook every time. Around this time I also noticed some calendar items had disappeared from the desktop, but not the PPC. Damn. I started deleting all the calendar items via the category view. Hung Outlook. Narrowed it down finally to one birthday item that apparently was corrupt. I was finally able to delete that after many attempts in different ways. The crazy thing is that all of the calendar items came back from the PPC on the first sync, including the corrupt item, and still everything is fine.
Now I'm back to normal, and can add items. What a mess. I wasted around 10-12 hours fixing this.
Note that I tried the scanpst.exe repair utility, which found nothing wrong with the PST file. Also the hangs occurred in both Outlook XP and 2000, on two different machines.