corman

Many have reported problems with duplicate Contact and Appointment entries after syncing with ActiveSync 4.x using WM 2005. Frequently these "duplicates" may become "triplicates" or even worse after compounding the original error by performing the all too necessarily frequent hard resets. The problem can probably be obviated initially by ensuring that before you sync for the first time or after a hard reset that your Outlook entries are correct and then making sure that you DO NOT respond affirmatively to the initial ActiveSync question asking if you want to combine entires on the AXIM and Outlook. If you do, Outlook unfortutnately does not seem to pay attention to items that are contained both in Outlook and the AXIM, but merely copies the items from Outlook to the AXIM, thus creating duplicates of almost everything. Upon a subsequent sync, Outlook sees all of these duplicate items as new items and copies them from the AXIM to Outlook thus resulting in duplicates in both places.

I found it was easy enough (albeit a pain) to eliminate the duplicates calendar items in Outlook by viewing them "By Category" and then going through each of my categories selecting every other item (the duplicates) while holding down the CTL key, and periodically hitting the DEL key to delete these duplicates. The same can be done for Contacts. Some people have tried the Outlook duplicate finder program, but that did not work for me (and others have reported the same).

However, it is not easy to eliminate the duplicates from the AXIM without painstakingly going through all of your calendar entries for as far back and ahead as you have maintained. So how can this be done easily?

Contacts and appointment data are maintained in a file on your AXIM named "pim.vol". This is located in the root directory of the AXIM.

1. Locate the pim.vol file and (for safety sake) rename it to "xpim.volx"
2. Soft reset your AXIM
3. After the AXIM comes back from the soft reset it will have created a new "empty" pim.vol file
4. After ensuring that you have cleaned up your duplicate Contacts and Appointments in Outlook, you can now put your AXIM in its cradle and resync
5. Outlook will see no Contact or Appointment entries and will copy them all to the AXIM
6. After ensuring that everything is OK, you may then delete the file that you renamed to "xpim.volx".

I have no idea why an "empty" pim.vol file is 200KB in size and mine, with only about 225 appointments and 145 contacts, is over 650KB. When it contained duplicate entires it was over 1 MB in size. It does not appear that this is a very efficiently constructed file with each entry averaging over 1K in length above the 200K base.

Steve