If you remove the device and just have the cradle, does the problem go away?

>Yes - didn't help. I don't see any conflicts in device manager, but it seems that the PC doesn't "see" the cradle....
>
>>Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Palm Desktop software?
>>
>>>My Palm hotsync was working fine. Today I decided to try the "Cue Cat" barcode scanner - it is connected inline between the keyboard and the jack. It worked fine (and its pretty neat, too, for a free whiz-bang kinda thing!)
>>>
>>>Unfortunately, now my hotsync won't load. I get two errors after every start/reboot. The first is "c:\palm\hotsync.exe A device attached to the system is not functioning." (red X messagebox). The second is "The MSVCIRT.DLL file is linked to missing export MSCVRT.DLL:??_U@YAPAXI@Z." (yellow exclamation messagebox)
>>>
>>>I uninstalled the Cue Cat software but it hasn't helped. Any ideas?
>>>
>>>TIA