open up 'connections' on your pc and look for the one that says someting about windows mobile device. double click it and look at properties. you should have 3 boxes there and they should all be checked. for some reason this happened to me this morning at work too. weird since it has been working fine until now. but now it is back for me and hopefully you too.
right, that's exactly what mine did. have you checked to see if there is a connection listed? mine was stuck on the connection thing too as if it didn't see the cradle. actually since the boxes were not checked it was not seeing the cradle.
Check if you have any 3rd party application, like norton, Mcaffee or Sygate (in case is this last one) be sure you can kil the service and maybe can be the issue, good luck