Gene, I had a similar situation -- x51v frozen at the "connecting" stage -- and had to do a few things before it worked reliably. See:
http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showthread.php?t=107714
I'm convinced that ActiveSync is so fragile that multiple things can cause it to fail -- bad drivers, hidden vpn/firewall problems, slightly tweaked network configurations, the registry pointing in a bad direction, left-over DLLs from prior installations -- so sometimes you've gotta work your way through a number of possible solutions.