Hi there,

I'm hoping someone can help. We have an ongoing issue with one of our users activation sticking at 98%.

I have read many threads on the address book being the problem and incorrect characters used etc but this is not my problem.

A year ago we had the following problem:

What I see on the handheld
This goes through and get stucks at 98% and says it has loaded 150/160 Address book items. When you move the cursor over the address book it changes this to completed and then sits there forever at 98%.

Things I have tried
Hours on the phone to Vodafone support which included:
Upgrading to the lastest version 4 of the BES software
Purging the database on the BES Server
Wiping the wireless backup on the BES Server
Numerous handheld wipes
New Firmware
New handheld
Waiting a few hours for activation to complete
Trying activation after removing all of the users contacts
Moving the users mailbox to a new Information Store within Exchange and then moving back and trying activation.

All of the above did not work.

In the end I backed up the users mailbox to a PST and deleted the users mailbox from our Exchange 2003 server and then recreated and restored the PST information. I tried activation and all worked fine.

This meant that there could not be a problem with the users contacts.

A year on and the same user has a new handheld and yet again we have the same problem. I cannot believe that the only fix is to delete the mailbox again. All of our other users do not experience these problems and they are all based on the same server. We do numerous activations with new handhelds and all work fine. Our information store does not have any issues.

I cannot think of anything else to try and was wondering if anyone had any ideas before doing the dreaded mailbox delete again. My major concern with this is if the user loses or replaces their handheld in the future, I can guarantee we will have the same problem.

Thanks for all your help
Rob

Do you have any errors in the Event Viewer for that user? What about the BES logs? There should be something in either of those for that user. Have you tried disabling the wireless sync for the Address Book for that user and then activate? If that works enable the wireless sync and see if all contacts transfer to the BB.

Thanks for the hints. There was nothing in the event viewer, but after a further study of the logs I found the following information (this could be a red herring), but I'm willing to try anything.

There are six entries for the address book within the MAGT log file that are listing contacts connected to our old domain that has been decommissioned. These are in the form of:

GetPIMItem - attempting to resolve email address (/o=Company/ou=Domain/cn=Recipients/cn=User) to get an SMTP address

As these cannot be resolved I'm wondering if this is the issue? I cannot delete these entries from the address book yet as the user is now out, but I will try when they return.

I'm not 100% hopefull as I previously mentioned deleting the mailbox and recreating has fixed the issue and these contacts would have been there then, but its worth a try.

Thanks
Rob

When it is stuck at 98% like that, which databases are still at initializing during the Activation?

It could be that it just stays in an endless loop trying to resolve it and eventually crashes itself but never completes the Activation. So my question is answered then, it probably is getting stuck on the Address Book.

I'm posting back just in case anyone else experiences this problem as we seem to have fixed it (fingers crossed). This came from some of the ideas that you all posted.

I deleted the user from the Blackberry server and removed the Blackberry information from the mailbox.
Rebooted the Blackberry server (may not be necessary)
Wiped the Handheld
Added the user back to the Blackberry server and disabled wireless syncronisation for the address book, memo's and tasks.
Generated the activation password and activated the Blackberry successfully.
Enabled wireless syncronisation of the address book, memo's and tasks and all is working correctly.

I did try the above with just disabling the wireless syncronisation of the address book before activation, but this did not work and it still got stuck at 98%.

I'm just glad its fixed - fingers crossed that this will work next time.

Thanks for all your help
Rob

If it is not the address book, then sometimes it is the Memos or tasks. Disabling all like you did is the right workaround ;).