Activesync issues

My first post here, but I have been lurking for a couple of months -- great forum. Kudos to all of the contributors.

I love my Touch Pro, but I have begun to experience maddening problems getting the thing to sync with both my office pc and my secretary's pc using Activesync.

For the first several weeks, things worked fine. Then, for reasons unknown, I started getting error messages when syncing my contacts and calendar after my secretary had updated those (on her pc) and synced to my phone. The updates would not be synced to the phone. We thought we resolved the issue by uninstalling and reinstalling Activesync, but the same problem has emerged.

I believe the error message had something to do with a firewall, but my office IT consultant (who has already billed me for his unsuccessful attempts to fix this) assures me that there is no firewall enabled on my desktop (that is apparently handled through our server). I thought the problems started shortly after IT guy installed some update or new version of the Symantic security software, but he again tells me this is not the problem.

My secretary and I are both using newish Dell pc's running XP.

Anyone else experience this issue (I did try a search, but did not see anything that I thought was on point)? Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance, and, again, great work on this forum!

-- Jeff