I have been having trouble with my Pocket PC (Toshiba e750 with Windows Mobile 2003) and ActiveSync 3.7.1 lately. My Pocket PC won't sync at all - the synchronization process terminates only 2 seconds after it begins. I've tried everything I can think of and then some. Played with all the USB settings. Purchased a stand-alone USB sync cable instead of using the cradle. Nothing worked.

Tonight I decided to try and upgrade every driver and/or software application I can find on my PC in case one of them are interfering. This included the usual - Windows Update, all major peripherals, and of course my ATI video driver. But I also updated my motherboard BIOS because I was 3 versions behind. (Yes, I can be reckless sometimes.)

For the record, I went from AMIBIOS V3.5 to V3.8 for my MSI 6309 motherboard. The Flash EPROM programming utility including in the MSI download is nice. No command line prompt - DOS graphical interface.

All went well. The BIOS flash upgrade finished in seconds. Once done, I rebooted. The BIOS installed fine, although I got a CMOS checksum error the first time I booted. The system put me into the BIOS setup program though, and once I saved and exited, it booted fine the second time.

I attributed this to the fact that, since the BIOS had changed, the CMOS record format may also have changed slightly. The AMIBIOS Setup Utility was updated from 1.3 to 1.51 I think.

As of now, the BIOS update hasn't fixed the problem. But I have to keep trying. The final alternative is to reinstall Windows XP from scratch, and I am not looking forward at all to doing that.