Comment 16 for bug 66355

Strange stuff. Looks like a timing issue.
I'd strongly recommend seeing if you can get libusb syncing to work.

What happened when you set the timeout to zero in gnome-pilot? Does it just sit there forever trying to connect until you kill it? You didn't send output for the gpilotd+timeout=0 case above... (I know, I'm very demanding)

In the pilot-xfer+timeout=2 case, did you try starting pilot-xfer BEFORE starting the sync on the PDA? That is most like the way that gpilotd tries to connect: i.e. it'll try to connect the instant the pda is detected.

Another thing to do is to try disabling HAL and restarting gpilotd. (/etc/init.d/hald stop, or something like that). That should fall back to checking for new USB devices every 2 seconds, instead of getting HAL notifications. That will introduce a random element into the attempts by gpilotd to connect. You may find that gnome-pilot will connect sometimes, and fail at other times.

Thanks for all your debugging. It is very helpful.