Pylon 3 had the option of keeping its configuration data in the Location documents in my Names.NSF, so I made a copy of that, and I also took a copy of my Notes.ini, before I started. Then I did a last HotSync, deleted Pylon from my Tungsten, and uninstalled Pylon from my Thinkpad. All of that almost went quite cleanly. The manual warns not to delete two files, but one of them, INSTAIDE.DLL, got deleted anyway. That had repercussions later.

Then I reinstalled Pylon, which was fine until it tried to validate the key that iAnywhere had sent me, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

It helps if your computer's connected to the Internet. Of course, if your computer is connected to the Internet, this message is rather frustrating. Click picture for a larger image.

Pylon tries to do that over the Internet, but for some reason that I never fathomed, it failed to get past my company's proxy server. I found that you can cancel this and carry on, so I did, as shown in Figure B, where it tells you that you will need to get hold of a license key and update Notes.ini.

FIGURE B

Pylon will let you bypass the Internet connection. Click picture for a larger image.

So I tried a HotSync, and that failed because of the missing INSTAIDE.DLL file. I was on a roll now, so I whizzed over to Palm's Web site, downloaded a new copy of Palm desktop, and installed that.

HotSync started up just fine, but Pylon Pro failed on the license. The message in the Pylon log is very helpful, and tells you what to do: you send the message off to Support and wait. A couple of emails later, I had a manual license. It's a number, keyed to your Notes hierarchical name, just like it always used to be. You then just type or paste it into the Pylon configuration database -- not update Notes.ini like the installer said you'd have to.

And after that, it HotSync'd just fine, except the Palm hung during the cleanup phase. I did a soft reset, and then checked all my Notes databases, and the Palm, very carefully. There were no duplicates, no missing data, all was fine. I synced again, and again, after that, and it all worked just as expected.

Next complication -- actually for me, a real plus -- was that just after I'd done all that, I got a new laptop, a Thinkpad T30 with XP Pro. So I installed Pylon all over again -- installed Notes, then copied the whole data area from my old laptop to the new one. I installed Palm desktop. I installed Pylon, and let it tell me I'd need a manual license. I copied in my old pyloncfg.nsf from the old machine again, which had the manual license key in it.

It worked first time, even though I had forgotten to clean it off the Palm.

Then my corporate installers got to work on my new laptop, and played with the networking. Result? Wrecked Start menu.

I had to install a third time to get it working again. This was the point that Notes 6.5 went Gold, so I installed that. In fact I installed Pylon several times as part of this review, and just copied back the pyloncfg.nsf each time. I never again saw the issue over the deletion of the instaide.dll, either. So I can report Pylon works on both Windows 98 and on XP, with Notes 6.5, and the install really isn't any hassle beyond the license validation thing.