Ninja Rants and Raves

My main desktop is running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit with Office 2007 Pro. I also have a Windows Mobile 6 (WM6) device…an O2 “xda Orbit” which is based on the HTC Artemeis.

For synchronisation I’ve been using Vista’s “Windows Mobile Device Center” WMDC and at some point I had upgraded this to WMDC 6.1 but I’m not sure when though. All was working.

Recently I found issues that when I tried to synchronize my WM6 device that synchronisation with Outlook 2007 would not occur and, instead, the synchronisation would just sit there for ages and not do anything. But I could still explore the WM6 device and run eWallet synchronization so I was sure that the partnership settings were correct. I did the obvious thing and ended the partnership and then created a new one. Nope, no quick fix here!

I tried looking in all the obvious places but I couldn’t see what was going on. I even restored my WM6 device from a backup going back several months but that didn’t fix anything although it proved to me that my back-up procedures for my WM6 were working!

I then thought that perhaps Office 2007 was corrupted or misconfigured. I then ran Office Diagnostics but no problems found. I tried the “repair office” tool but this tool couldn’t run as certain files couldn’t be found. I even tried to add/subtract various Office components through the Office 2007 CD but that still didn’t run properly as, again, certain files couldn’t be found. So I uninstalled Office 2007, and then reinstalled Office 2007. Well, synchronization still wasn’t working.

My next step was to uninstall WMDC 6.1 and then reinstall it. That didn’t cure the problem. I now wasn’t sure what to do. So I went back to my WM6 device and looked at the ActiveSync application. I noticed that ActiveSync had logged an error. It reported an error number 0×8503001c. This turns out to be an important number…

I did a quick search on Google for 0×8503001c and found a number of people also getting this error message. A lot of these sites actually weren’t very useful as the solutions offered didn’t work and which I’d already tried.  But one site had an article which was useful. In fact it was perfect. The solution is simple. Uninstall WMDC 6.1 and then install WMDC 6.0. Yes, that worked! I would recommend that you reboot Vista after each uninstall and install of WMDC just in case there are any components that require a reboot to be activated but I have no evidence for this. At the present time WMDC 6.0 (for 32-bit Vista) can be downloaded from the Microsoft download link.

This is a known problem and Microsoft need to get their finger out and fix it so that we can use specific bits of additional functionality that WMDC 6.1 + offers.

I hope that this article helps anyone else that is experiencing this problem.

Copyright © 2008 Kulvinder Singh Matharu - All Rights Reserved