Everyone with a cell phone running windows mobile 5 or windows mobile 6 and a computer running windows vista has had the chance to experience windows mobile device center. While windows XP used active sync, vista now  uses WMDC. The first release of WMDC was 6.0 (maybe to make everyone think it had been around for awhile and so would be nice and stable?). Until sometime in early 2009, this worked fairly well for most users. However, now that WMDC 6.1 has been released and automatically upgraded through windows update, many people have experienced a multitude of errors trying to sync their contacts, calendars, tasks, and everything else that WMDC lets you do.

Problem:

After successfully using WMDC for almost a year, I plugged in my phone using the usb cable to sync my contacts. WMDC said “connecting” and then gave a little red x with the error “couldn’t connect”. So I googled around and found some advice saying to delete the sync profile and recreate it. This was easy enough, goto control panel, open up “sync center” and delete the profile. So I unplug my phone, and plug it back in and I see this nice default screen:

wmdc default

So I click on “setup your device” and after a few seconds, this error pops up:

there is a problem with your connection. please disconnect and reconnect your device and try again.

Great. Nice instructions. Disconnecting and reconnecting my device simply gives the error again, rebooting changes nothing. So I check out the event log and under application, there is an error every time I plug in my device:

RapiMgr EventID 8

Windows Mobile-based device failed to connect due to communication (0x8007274a) failure (see data for failure code).

So I create a filter and see that this error has been happening ever since I first connected my phone to my computer almost a year ago. That doesn’t make any sense, how come I’ve been getting this error forever but it’s been working fine until now? Whatever, thanks microsoft. So after a bunch more googling around, I found many possible fixes.

I spent about two straight days trying all of these different solutions without success. I had given up and used an alternative method to get my contacts onto my phone since I had done a hard reset. A few weeks later, not being able to sync my calendar is starting to aggravate me. I decide to try some things again, focusing on uninstalling everything I can, and reloading WMDC 6.0

Here are the basic categories of things you can do to fix WMDC, check out the websites below for specific steps:

• delete the sync profile from your pc and phone
• hard reset your phone (this resets it to factory defaults, wiping everything)
• uninstall/reinstall drivers for your phone
• turn off “advanced networking” on your phone’s usb connection (this changes the driver set it uses, see above)
• uninstall WMDC 6.1 and put WMDC 6.0 back on (this is like removing a difficult virus. seriously microsoft.)
• update WMDC
• update phone drivers
• turn off windows one care or any other firewall that could be blocking the connection
• make sure outlook isn’t causing the problem. do a scanpst or even make a new profile
• make a new user on the computer

After trying all of these, I re-attempted to revert to WMDC 6.0 and it WORKED! Now you must remember that I have already tried all these other options, so currently my phone has been hard reset and all my sync partnerships are deleted from the pc and the phone. Because this didn’t work the first time for me, here are the exact steps I took in hopes that you can follow along.

1. use control panel to uninstall both wmdc apps
2. use device manager to uninstall (and remove files) for your pocketpc and the network adapter
3. uncheck advanced usb on the phone and then use device manager to uninstall those devices also
4. unplug phone
5. kill the task wmdc.exe
6. stop the 2 services (RapiMgr, WcesComm)
7. delete everything you can in c:\%windir%\windowsmobile  (you can’t kill 5 files in the en directory)
8. Rightclick/properties the windowsmobile folder
9. security/advanced/owner/edit  change owner to the administrators group
10. delete the windowsmobile folder
11. run ccleaner or some other registry cleaner to get most of the stuff out
12. download the x32 or x64 wmdc 6.0 (which shows as 1.0) from microsoft
13. open regedit
14. search for “windowsmobile” and pretty much kill all the keys. There were some bluetooth keys I didn’t remove, and I backed up everything before I deleted it.
15. reboot
16. install wmdc 6.0
17. uncheck use advanced usb functionality on phone
18. plugin phone
19. WMDC comes up automatically, click setup new connection and it WORKS!
20. unplug phone, recheck use advanced usb, plugin phone. WMDC does not come up and device manager only shows the network adapter, not the portable device.
21. Unplug phone and reboot
22. plugin phone, device manager now sees the portable device and sync works with advanced usb functionality enabled!

If microsoft would just provide some easy way to uninstall WMDC (and have it remove all the files and keys and such) this would be a much shorter process. Advanced usb functionality doesn’t really do anything related to syncing, it’s for tethering and other fun internet sharing things you can do with a mobile phone. So if you can get it working, it allows these fun activities, but it isn’t required for syncing to work.

Here are the best sources I used for researching my WMDC problems:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/help/synchronize/device-center-troubleshooting.mspx

http://www.pocketpcfaq.com/faqs/wmdc/connectoverview.htm

http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/windows-mobile-device-cannot-connect-or-quickly-disconnect-or-drop-and-not-sync-with-vista-wmdc-activesync/

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsmobileactivesync/thread/331328a5-997f-4f7c-b411-f6c2f007613d

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