Treo Updater Update

If you’re trying to call my cell phone, you need to e-mail me instead. 
It’s going to be another day or so.

When I got home last night, the Treo Updater was still stuck.  I called
Palm, and on the first or second ring, a real support person answered–pretty
cool.  I don’t know if I dialed in at a magic moment, but I was expecting a
long hold.

We killed the update process, soft reset the phone, checked some settings,
and found that the update had partially installed.  Not such a good
thing.  We cleaned out a PalmUpd123 folder, removed a Palm Update program,
and soft reset the phone.

Then the fun really began.  I had been getting some ActiveSync error,
but all my information was updating fine, so I ignored them.  As it turns
out, the updater is extremely finicky, and you need to have a perfect ActiveSync
in order to get the updater installed.  The tech support guy had me look in
a temp directory for some files that may be piling up.  This directory
normally contains a few files; mine had almost 5000.  It takes 30 min or so
to delete a couple hundred or so generated during installation (this is that
“cleaning up” step).  I was obviously going to be waiting for some time
once I started the delete process.  I stopped the process this morning
after 11 hours, and there were 1800 still to go.  So I started deleting
again and left the phone plugged into the charger.  I imagine it’ll be
ready when I get home tonight.  24 hours to clean out the temp
directory–ugly!

These temp files are often the result of ActiveSync problems, probably the
problems causing the error I was ignoring.  I had my phone set to sync
mail, calendar and contacts from my company’s Exchange server, and calendar and
contacts on my home PC.  Palm tech support informed me that you shouldn’t
be able to sync calendar and contacts in both places.  Someone forgot to
tell my phone, and I’ve been sync-ing both for some time now.

My next steps are to finish deleting all those temp files, turn off the PC
sync for calendar and contacts, soft reset (just because), perform a good
ActiveSync, and then try the updater again.

I’m going to hope that future iterations of Windows Mobile do a better job of
managing these temp files, because this is a real nuisance.