Notification problems - Possible fix
 

Greetings All,

I have been having problems with the notification queue since about two weeks after I purchased my XV6700. There have been several posts from folks that appear to have the exact same issue that I have. Generally the problem occurs when my first notification of the day does not wake up the PPC, it just waits until I hit the power button and then starts blaring. :evil: It is not limited to the system alarm, it also causes any and all notifications to suspend. If multiples are received before you hit the power button then it generally locks up and requires a soft reset and sometimes causes multiple ringings that are tough to clear.

I have tried many things to fix this such as the wakeup tweak, new ROMs, new alarm programs, cleaning the queue, deleting suspect items from the queue, etc... Nothing seemed to work.

I believe that I may have found the culprit though. There are several windows procs that run occasionally, they are clocknot.exe, calnot.exe, repllog.exe, and calupd.exe, and they do various house cleaning chores. I believe that the cause of all of my woes falls on calupd.exe, it somehow corrupts the notification queue and causes my PPC to stay asleep when the next notification is due.

I have proven this by systematically disabling each of the .exe's and causing them not to run at night, which is easier said than done as they are each set by the ROM and cannot actually be removed. BUT they can be changed. 8)

You can effect how often they run by creating a new entry for each and setting the date far into the future, in my case I set them to run on January 1st 2010, the old entry disappears when you enter the new one and keeps it from running. Each entry even survives a soft reset, except for calupd.exe which must be re-created after each reset.

All of my notifications are now ROCK SOLID, I have not had an error for the past two weeks, which is a marathon for my PPC!! The only thing that I am concerned with is the toll for effectively disabling the cleanup procedures. I have not found any ill effect yet, but I have not had them disabled for a great length of time.

My question is: As long as I run my own maintenance now and then to clean up the crap, is there any problem with doing this???

Any insights would be appreciated...

-J

what exactly does calupd.exe clean?


Great find BTW

I have never read where anyone has outlined exactly what calupd.exe does, but I believe that it goes through all of your calendar entries, deletes old ones, and adds notifications for new ones when needed. So if you use your calendar a lot then it may not be good for you to disable it. However, you can run it manually whenever you want to clean things up, but when doing so it schedules itself to start running nightly again.

What I need now is an .exe that would reset calupd.exe, clocknot.exe, and calnot.exe to some date like January 1, 2020 so that I could run it daily to ensure that it disables them. Then I could run the cleanups whenever I want and still be sure that they do not run at night... Unfortunately I do not have the expertise to write my own program. Any help in getting this done would be greatly appreciated!

:D

You said you've been trying new ROMs, but have you used a 3.5 ROM? If you ever have time to try one of the new ROMs (Unified Kitchen-based) I'd be curious if your notifications issue improves. I know this doesn't answer your original question the way you posed it but my understanding is that notifications are improved in AKU3.5. On the old ROM (2.2) I had something like 975 notifications, and after running AKU3.5 for awhile (granted not as long) I only had 21. So I think something was re-worked in there, but I may be wrong.

It does seem like you're having an unusual number of issues with notifications, though I'll admit I never use the 6700 alarm feature. I would never trust an MS Windows product for something as important as an alarm, and I'm not joking...

Yep, I am currently running AKU 3.5 and it still has the same problem. I thought about installing the Unified kitchen based ROM, but it seems that they are still working out the bugs so I will probably wait a while.

Have you tried using pmclean to clean up your errant notifications? It is very simple freeware and seems to work very well. You can also run clocknot.exe. and calnot.exe from within. For the most part it seems that WM5 does very little to control the buildup even though it runs the housekeeping apps at night, from what I can tell they don't do anything constructive.

I believe that my issue may be hardware related since I have 3 friends that use the Apache running the same stuff and have never had any issues. Maybe they changed something in the chipset or had some population of processors with a Vih level problem that is keeping it asleep?? The alarm worked for about 2 weeks when I first installed 3.5 but then slowly things started going wrong, I'm not really sure why but it is due to the windows processes running at night causing some type of corruption.

I have searched around and there are many other folks, albeit few in relation to the overall install base, that are having the exact same issue that I have, but there hasn't been any solution found that I am aware of...

I am currently using SpbTime for my alarm, but it is at the mercy of the hardware that it is installed upon. I understand that I could just use a $2 alarm clock, but it is personal now, my OCD side states that I MUST find a solution...

So, does anyone know of a way to permanently disable calupd.exe, calnot.exe, and clocknot.exe?

The ROM continually re-inserts it into the queue when you delete them. The only fix that I have found so far is to schedule them for some time in the future to keep them from running, but it must be done whenever a reset is performed...

What happens if you just remove them from the ROM to begin with?

I'm not sure, how would you remove them?

I would imagine that you would also need to remove whatever creates their autorun entry in the notification queue, otherwise it would just error out when it tries run at the scheduled time??

If you are working in a kitchen, they are all located in OS\f50e9a40-aed9-497a-bdea-84451210e960. Deleteing them from that directorey will remove them from the ROM. I believe this will also remove any registry settings, and scheduleing that coorespond. Weather or not it will cause other problems will remain to be seen.

I will add to the discussion by saying that I am a Spb whore and use almost every single one of Spb's program EXCEPT Spb time. Even installed on main memory and NOT running the today plug-in it has caused the same problems you describe. Uninstalling it has been the only thing that would fix it. I talked to Spb about it briefly but never got around to fully explaining to them the problem. I suggest you try and run the phone without Spb time (like I said all the other programs run beautifully) and see if that fixes your problem.

Do you routinely use your 6700 for your wake up alarm? Did you find an alarm program that would work reliably? I have tried using the system alarm as well as ptravelalarm and they appeared to have the same problem, but I didn't un-install spbtime while trying it.

I have been talking to spbtime support and painfully explained the problem, they stated that they couldn't offer a solution since it seemed user specific and probably isn't a problem with their software. They were nice but not very accommodating

Well.. this may be using a crayon to touch up a Van Gogh, but...

I use my 6700 (Kirvin's Clean & Simple Sprint ROM) as my alarm clock in the morning, and since I let it charge all night, I just went to Start>Settings>System>Power>Advanced and unchecked "Turn off device if not used for..." under "External Power". I use SPBTime and it runs like a champ.

Hope that helps.

Yeah, I heard that just leaving it "Awake" works well, but I would prefer not to since it really doesn't require charging each night, I can usually go 3 or 4 days without plugging it in. Since I travel somewhat frequent, it is inconvenient to always carry the charger and then remember to pack it in the morning...

I appreciate the input though, the more info the better...

I have found two things that fix the notifications problem:
1) Tweaks2K2 has a system trick that is an alarm fix and a wake up to full power mode. This has been helpful
2) pocketmax's alarm today. download the trial and it will fix your notification queue.

MemMaid is supposed to do the same thign but I havent found it as effective

Good luck. I've been there. :wink:

I have tried Tweaks2K2 but there really isn't anything there that I can't do by just manually editing the registry. The wake up to full power mode works (it is also available in Burr Oaks "wakeup tweak") really drains the battery since it seems that calupd.exe hangs and never allows it to go back into sleep mode. I tried alarm today and it has the same problem, it seems to be a device problem rather than a software issue.

Something with calupd.exe is killing me, as long as I keep it from running then everything works great. I have gone almost a month without a notification issue and I have not needed to perform a soft reset once!!

I guess that it could be removed from the ROM but I don't know how to do that, I guess I am stuck manually resetting the run time for calupd.exe every time I do a soft reset, which now is almost never, so I guess it really isn't a problem.

I would appreciate everyone's input on other options though...

In Tweaks2K2 which setting is it?

I think I may be having the same problem...My calendar notifications go off w/o a hitch for a while but for some reason out of nowhere some of the notifications go off, but disappear before I hit the "Dismiss" button. After that there is no "Notification" button waiting for me to clear. A couple weeks down the road and I get 7 of the same notification going off for something a week and a half ago and another 7 for a different notification. And it goes on and on...Anyway, my fix was to reflash the phone and 2-3 weeks later reflash it again.

I'm going to remove calupd.exe from my custom ROM tonight and reflash. I will keep you all updated.



Drew

Well, I've been running the ROM w/o calupd.exe for about 10hrs now. No "cannot find calupd.exe" or "calupd.exe is missing or corupt" errors so far. Notifications are fine, but, as said before, the problem doesn't REALLY rear its ugly head until a week or two into it. I have been able to make, edit, and delete appointments in the calendar with no problem. Again, I will keep you updated.



Drew

Great to hear, do you use your calendar for many things though? I think that it may cause problems with your calendar updates and notifications if you use it a lot...

I have a few repeating alarms in my calendar and only add appointments when I'm pretty sure I'll forget something. I mostly use regular alarms though. I would also like to add that looking through memmaid shows that there are no occurrences of calupd.exe, so I shouldn't be getting any errors from the ppc trying to run it. Also, on another note, memmaid shows ALL birthdays in my contacts for the current year (even past months of the current year), but regular appointments only for the current day in the queue. Maybe a huge surplus of birthdays can cause the original problem?

As for calupd.exe, the way I see it, since all of my old appt's keep reappearing after hard resets and flashes; if the calendar is updated/changed/cleaned by the phone using any of the above programs, activesync and outlook will just throw the crap back onto the phone anyway. This is even with activesync in the "replace item on desktop" mode. So the only real way to clean out the calendar is to do it manually. Calupd.exe is useless IMO.

But, its only been a couple of days, so we'll see what happens in a couple of weeks.



Drew

P.S. If my ppc and calendar start going nuts, I have a backup of my original custom ROM, so no worries.

any updates on this? i'm intrigued by it, because my 6700 seems to give me about 1.5-2 weeks of intellligent behavior, then it starts the long road downhill until i give up and hard reset once again. It also does something at night that sucks the battery dry, but I can't pinpoint it. I have weatherpanel installed (though I think that came with this latest ROM, but I've had my own copy for years) and yahoo IMAP, both update every 30 minutes. This seems to work well during the day.

Running colonel's 3.5.8.

Still no word?
 

I would sure like to know how to fix this, as this is the main source of the 'hate' part of my love-hate relationship with this phone!

Oh yeah...this thread...

Here's your update, the removal of calupd.exe from the kitchen did nothing. 2 weeks down the road the reminders started doing their normal thing...not going off, not waking the ppc, saving 10-15 up before letting it all out at the same time, auto dismissing themselves....the list goes on.

I flashed to the new Unified ROM 1.02 two days ago, so we'll see what happens with that. However, if it continues, I'm going to attribute it to one thing, and one thing only: Outlook and ActiveSync (or two things).

After my flash of the new rom, I found 10 occurences of my mom's birthday...TEN!!! I think it's because of the multiple times I flashed the phone, then synced it back up...every time I did this outlook would add a new occurence of the birthday...it wouldn't surprise me if outlook did the same with all appts. The multiples would show up as a single and fubar each other in the process. The only fix I can think of (and I've been to busy and/or lazy to try it) would be the following:

1) Plug the phone into the computer and let it sync up.
2) Delete the device from activesync.
3) Remove activesync from the computer...CLEANLY (go delete the folders associated w/ it when the uninstall is done, run through the registry, etc.)
4) Open outlook and delete everything in the calendar...just for cleanliness I would go in and delete all of my contacts too...not back them up then delete them then restore them, delete them so they will be rebuilt by hand.
5) Restart the computer
6) Install activesync
7) Hard reset the phone
8) WITHOUT making any new contacts or calendar entries, sync the phone
9) Make sure activesync is in the "replace item on device" mode
10) Create the contacts
11) Sync the phone
12) Create the calendar entries
13) Sync the phone
14) Wait 2 weeks and see if crap blows up.

I would also stay away from putting birthdays in any contact's info...

Anyway, like I said, I've been too lazy to try this out. I might give it a go this weekend. But thats the best I can give you.



Drew

That's a little extreme.

All you need to do is back up your Synchronized Files (I change the name of the folder in My Documents) and delete the mobile device in ActiveSync.

Hard reset and reload everything. There should not be any duplicates in the calendar or contacts with 1 exception: *2 Customer Service

8)

Yeah, but I wouldn't trust that everything is gone. Of course, this could just be the fact that I work with ridiculously crappy software on a regular basis and have come to accept that it is that difficult. Convoluted processes like the one above are an everyday occurrence in my line of work. In any case, I still wouldn't trust that everything is gone...In situations like these, we call it the "Microsoft Factor" in my work place...



Drew