The computer wasn't responding at all, when I pressed the HotSync button, and I was pretty sure it wasn't a hardware failure of some kind. But I tried a few things anyway, and found no hardware faults - the Mac actually saw that the 7135 was plugged in. (Via the USB tab in "System Profiler".)
(BTW: The 7135 is still the best out there, for what I'm looking for: A real Palm device (for apps, Mac compatibility (though the future looks cloudy...), reminders even when "off net", etc.) and a real phone. Bonus that it's a flip format which I still prefer.)
So I started playing software games.
I'd seen lots of reports of HotSync problem under recent versions of Mac OS X, but had never had them myself, so always chalked them up to other problems. I looked at those reports anyway. I looked at related links. I compared other systems that were able to HotSync successfully. I checked out my backups. Nothing.
I tried re/installing. I'd been putting it off for awhile, since the latest minor release didn't have anything that I was interested in, but now seemed like a good time to do it - maybe in a bit of spring cleaning, I'd yanked a critical piece, and the installer would put it back. This was an adventure I wasn't looking for.
First, the installer is stupid; it wants to run as root. Otherwise (even after authenticating as an admin user) it whines at the end about failing, giving you a chance to try again - and fail again -- with zero indication of what the real problem is.
Running as root works great - except if you're logged in as root to do it, since it of course isn't installing the stuff in your user folder and therefore won't sync when you log in as yourself. Here's where knowing some command line or having something like Pseudo can be pretty handy. Luckily, not too many installers are still stupid. (BTW: Is FirstClass still in this category?)
Anyway, even this didn't help (but at least the installer wasn't erroring out), so I did a bit more Googling. (I coined the phrase "Never underestimate the power of Google." And it is oh so true.) Anyway, I found a few things to try, but nothing freed the logjam.
The I remembered something I'd see again recently, in a few blogs (ex: [Link]): Holding down the shift key: either while booting (for a "safe boot") or while logging in (to skip user startup items). I tried the latter and suddenly it was able to HotSync!
I remembered that I'd cleaned out a few of the startup items (via the Accounts System Preference pane) recently, so maybe that was the root of the problem. I noted the remaining ones and started to attempt to find where the problem was. I say "attempted", since I never found out - they're all back on and HotSync'ing is working fine. I don't know if it was some combination of the earlier debugging steps, or just plain voodoo. Yuck. :(
But at least I can HotSync again and get on with my life! :)
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