Don’t mess with your Windows Mobile Notification Queue

I’ve bought a HTC Touch Diamond2 recently and started discovering it like with every new device. Of course a lot of software from 3rd party made it onto the device. Also the FdcSoft Task Manager which allows for various editing options including a nice registry editor.

Also on that list of options is a notification queue editor on which I stumbled on. Being ignorant about Windows Mobile devices I though of it as a kind of notification log which just got full with entries. Unfortunately the notification queue – which is just called “Notifications” – in the UI, is not a log! 😉

This queue actually holds information about what actions to perform when a specific and/or perdiodic event occurs. Of course I didn’t know that offhand and right away “cleaned up” that notification queue by simply selecting all entries and pushing them to /dev/null so to speak. After some tinkering around I hooked the device up to the laptop via the USB cable and had to realize that it would not initiate the ActiveSync/WMDC connection and would just load the battery. The known device plug-in/out sound was audible, though. Then I established the ActiveSync/WMDC connection via Bluetooth and things worked fine. So something got screwed.

You have two ways to solve this:

1. Hard-Reset your device after making a backup of all your important data. Recommending PPCPimBackup here.
2. Restore the previously deleted ActiveSync/WMDC notification queue event handlers.

How do I know that a Hard-Reset fixes this? Well, ahem… After first messing with the WMDC installation installed device drivers  on Windows7 and then reinstalling Windows7 entirely and then getting no result, and then reviving the Vista installation and seeing that this also didn’t get the device connected via USB cable, I took the last measure. And of course, by not knowing that the deletion of the Notification Queue screwed things up, I managed to do just that again. Yesterday.

Restoring your deleted ActiveSync/WMDC notification queue event handlers:

1. Open up the Notification Queue editor in the Task Manager
2. Add the following items

Application: repllog.exe
Arguments: /remote /h
Type: CNT_EVENT
Event: <none>

Application: repplog.exe
Arguments: AppRunAfterRs232Detect
Type: CNT_EVENT
Event: NOTIFICATION_EVENT_RS232_DETECTED

Application: repllog.exe
Arguments: AppRunAfterRndisFnDetected
Type: CNT_EVENT
Event: NOTIFICATION_EVENT_RNDIS_FN_DETECTED

Note, that the “Event” types have to be guessed by the textual representation in the the event drop down, and that it is not possible in the UI to select an Event of type <none>. If have chosen the RS232 one for the first entry.

After all things have been set up, a Soft-Reset (recommending TD2 SoftReset) could be required (don’t recall) and you can happily connect via USB to your Windows computer again.

Sometimes one has to learn things the hard way …