Digital Home Thoughts: New Windows Live Sync Update a Disaster on Windows 7 Computers

Yesterday morning, Microsoft's Live Sync service wasn't working for me. It has its glitches here and there, so I waited and assumed it would start working again. Hours passed, and it still wasn't connecting. That's not normal, so I checked the Sync Web site. Nothing posted there. I posted in the newsgroup, and discovered it was planned maintenance - evidently the Live Sync team expects people to check their updated-a-few-times-a-year blog regularly for announcements. Why they wouldn't have pushed out a message via the client is beyond me - they have the capability to do so, yet they don't use it when they should.

I upgraded Live Sync on five of my computers today, and the install went smooth. I noticed that after installing the client it still doesn't auto-run itself - which is silly and would confuse most users - so I ran the client, re-entered my username/password, then watched what happened. Nothing happened.

Four of the five computers are running Windows 7. Four of the five computers are showing me grayed out disconnected library status icons. Only my one Windows Vista computer shows it's still connected to the library.This makes no sense, so I went to the Web site, and wouldn't you know it: all of my Windows 7 computers have been duplicated in "Devices" section, and the newly created duplicates have a "1" after the name - and are not associated with ANY libraries. For example, I have a computer named KATANA. The Sync Web site shows me KATANA and KATANA1, and KATANA1 is the device that's connected but has zero libraries associated with it.

The only way I can think to fix this is to do the following for each of the four impacted computers:

1. Delete the old device listing
2. Re-name the new device listing, removing the "1"
3. Re-associate the new device listing with all the libraries

This is going to take at least an hour or more to do (I have multiple libraries on each device, and another two computers to install the update on, all running Windows 7), and I'm pretty ticked off that I have to waste time fixing this problem. Could the Live Sync team please explain why this update wasn't tested with Windows 7 computers? I'm not alone with this problem - there are 72 comments (and counting) over on the Live Sync blog with people complaining, many of them about this exact issue. That tells me that this isn't some unique problem with my account.

Live Sync is one of the most amazingly useful products Microsoft has, yet it's managed in such a amateurish and ridiculous way, I can't help but worry that it's going to be killed off because it's clearly of no importance to the company.