We are having some bad things happen but only to 8700r series. When we try to activate them they hit 90% complete and stop. Never going beyond. The 7100's and 7280's activate fine. We have tried wipping the handhelds, creating a new profile, moving the BES to a different server and the initial install server. They all still fail. The BES is within the corporate LAN. It is extremely annoying, even more so, because older blackberry models work perfectly fine.

What we have noticed is that if you disable the address book sync, wipe the handheld and try again. The activation completes. What doesn't make sense is why a 7280 will activate on the same account that a 8700 will not with address book sync enabled. Unfortunately having the address book not sync wirelessly is unacceptable.

So I have 14 8700r blackberries on my desk that are all paperweights right now. Does anyone have any suggestions? We are using Exchange with SP2 and the BES has SP1, both run on Server 2003.

Delete the wireless backup on the BES for the user you are activating...that will fix the problem! It is only used for the device config and nothing more than that.