Comment 5 for bug 67077

Joel,
silly question, but there isn't any chance you've got two versions of gpilotd on your system: one that you run from the command line and one that the applet finds? There aren't any arguments that I can think of that would affect the behaviour as you describe.

One thing to check is whether your /dev/pilot symlink always points to the right ttyUSBx device. I've a vague notion I've come across cases where it sometimes gets confused, pointing to either ttyUSB1 or ttyUSB0, but not consistently. If this is the case you may want to try configuring gpilotd to use the correct ttyUSBx device rather than relying on /dev/pilot. Either that, or configure pilot-link for libusb syncing (search around for the howto) and then you can use the "usb:" pseudo device.