Do this at your own risk.
(The following was assembled from entries in the log I keep for my PC, named A364).
During the hell that was making this thing work, I encountered a sync error known as the dreaded Support Code 85010014. Although I never found out exactly what the definition for this code is, I did find out that hundreds of people have dealt with it. My A364 PC log, over the past 3 days, describes the hell I went through eliminating the cause of it.
The cause is some elusive problem with Outlook. The Dell Axim X51v comes with a CD that contains installations for Outlook 2002, and ActiveSync 4.0. I later downloaded 4.1, as it is said to fix a lot of bugs in the 4.0 release.
The manifestation of this Support Code is that ActiveSync, when first set up, may appear to be syncing your handheld, but at the end of the process, when it should say “connected and synchronized’, it shows a URL-type blue link that says "status". When you click that, you see the error message.
The fix can be rather convoluted. After combing many links on the internet, Dell's own Support forum, and other forums, I read about people who found apparently different ways to fix the problem.
For me, installing Outlook 2002 on A364 meant “over top of Outlook 2000 (part of Office 2000) currently installed”. I actually got ActiveSync working twice. The first time was before A364 subsequently developed major instabilities, and ultimately made me do a fallback to a previous Drive Image, and rebuild A364 back to the same level of installed apps, but this time make it stable.
The first time, I told the Dell CD to install Outlook 2002 and it said it was going to remove Outlook 2000 first. That was probably the best choice, because I did not have all that much difficulty getting things working. The second time around, after the rebuild of A364, I decided to remove the currently installed Outlook 2000 by using the Office 2K setup and un-checking Outlook.
Outlook, and in fact Office and WinXP themselves, have the bad tendency to want to hang on to old data after something is removed. It seems that going this route must not have correctly eliminated the right files on Outlook. After doing that, I had the Dell CD install Outlook 2002 and ActiveSync. But I kept getting the Support Code error.
After a lot of research and trying several uninstall/reinstall episodes to no avail, I finally got it to work. This last time, I applied a sort of panacea of everything I had learned. I am not sure which of the included steps was actually the solution, but the result was positive.
Please read this entire procedure through before attempting it.
The underlying theme is that you may need to do any or all of the following:
-**COMPLETELY Uninstall and re-install Outlook and ActiveSync **
-Run the Install/Repair on your current Outlook installation – (does not work for some)
-Make sure you have Outlook completely set up and openly running on your PC the first time you ActiveSync the Axim.
-You can get it working with the ActiveSync 4.0 from the Dell CD, but I strongly recommend you update to 4.1 in the end, as it is supposed to fix “several bugs” in 4.0.
-Make certain to plug the cradle (or cable, if that is what you are using) directly into a USB port on the PC. Don’t use a hub! ActiveSync doesn’t connect well through a USB hub.
**The gory details of a “Complete” Outlook un-installation**:
As I mentioned above, Outlook, like most of Microsoft’s products, tries desperately (and usually succeeds, thus – the problem) to hang on to any and all settings from a previous installation. So if your current installation isn’t working…. neither would the new one, if you don’t do something about it.
The thing to do is to try to eliminate every possible source of re-integrating “old data and settings” into the new installation of Outlook. Here are the steps I took to that end.
Make sure you aren’t running any other programs.
First, a few more facts I uncovered along the way, so you know what your dealing with. Some more excerpts from notes I kept along the way:
“Upon each and every single installation of Outlook, 2 log files get created in C:\Documents and Settings\<(your PC login name)>\Local Settings\temp. They are named (for my installation) “Outlook 2002 Setup (000x).txt” where x is apparently the number of times you have installed Outlook 2002. One is typically 4KB. The second, using the same name, but adding in “Task (000x)” just ahead of the txt suffix, is an incredible 6MB+, and grows with each successive installation. If you open this txt file in notepad, and then select All and copy it to Word, using a standard Times New Roman 12 point font, it is (ready for this one?) 1,252 pages long!!!!!!!!!
I think I have just uncovered one of the major “data preservation” areas for Outlook!
If you have the stomach for reading this sort of thing, you will find all sorts of information regarding the options you turned on or off during setup, file path names, etc. I can’t imagine what they needed 1252 pages of log file for!? But I’ll bet eliminating these would be one way to prevent Outlook from expecting to find a PST file in a specific place, for example (causing your new installation to possibly import the wrong set of records) or hanging onto settings from a prior installation that went sour. I will archive them to a zip file far away from C: just to be sure.”
(It later turned out I never needed them. But saving them would be prudent in case you might need to undo this procedure.)
At this point, I did something I don’t think you need to repeat. I actually dug through the entire Registry file of my PC looking for “Outlook” and “pst” just to see what was stored there. I found a lot of entries for the two, but nothing that appeared to have any information pointing Outlook to a location to get a PST file, or hanging on to previous settings.
1- Archive your Outlook Personal Folders entire content to a PST file and save it somewhere safe.
2- Either copy the aforementioned Outlook Setup text files to a remote location, like a floppy disk, or hide them in a Zip file somewhere far away from where you run Outlook. The point is to make them inaccessible to the new installation. If you leave them in their natural state, Outlook will find them, no matter which hard drive you move them to.
3- Uninstall (from the Control Panel) Outlook and ActiveSync
4- Open Windows Explorer
5- In Tools/Folder Options/ View – Check the following (you may want to reverse these changes when you are finished)
a. Display the contents of Systems Folders
b. Show hidden files and folders
c. UNCHECK – Hide protected operating system files
6- Back in the main Windows Explorer view:
7- – Search your entire PC for “outlook”
This is the dangerous part. If you have Outlook installed as part of Office, for example, and you delete the wrong things, it could affect Office. You might have to reinstall Office. However, I did not have any problems after doing this.
8- If you used the zip file option, you will likely see the Outlook log files discussed above when you get to the “search” part. But they will now show as residing inside your zip file in the location you stored them to, if you saved them on your PC. They should not show up as being on C: as they did originally. You can leave them alone in their zip file.
9- Every other place that you find an Outlook folder – unless you see something inside it that looks like it is obviously needed by Office (if installed) – delete the Outlook folder.
10- Delete the folder from which your installation of ActiveSync was running, if it did not already disappear after the un-installation.
11- Hard Reset your Axim.
12- SHUT DOWN your PC - NOT RESTART – There really is a difference.
13- After at least 10 seconds of hard drive inactivity, Start your PC.
14- Install Outlook 2002
15- Install ActiveSync 4.1
16- Start Outlook 2002, and set up your email account. You do not have to import your archived PST folder yet, if you would rather wait until after you see if things are working.
17- With Outlook 2002 up and running:
18- Plug your Axim directly into a USB port on your PC.
I could NOT get this working by using my powered USB 2.0 Hub that handles my other peripherals. Once I started plugging my Axim cradle’s USB plug directly into the back of my PC, it worked just fine.
My setup was up and running at this point. I hope yours is too. If luck was with you and it is, you can now import the Outlook PST backup archive you made, and your email, Contacts, Calendar, etc, will be restored.
If you get ActiveSync working, but still get some kind of error, try un-checking all but 1 item in the ActiveSync Tools/Options/ Settings menu. If it syncs OK then, add them back in one by one until you find the item causing the problem. Then you know where to start for a solution
