I recently purchased a Palm m505 palmtop computer from eBay. After installing the Palm Desktop software on my Windows 2000 computer I attempted to run the software. However, the program crashed with an access violation message. At first I thought this might be a specific problem with Palm Desktop, so I decided to uninstall the program through the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel. However, when attempting to open the control panel the same access violation error message appears. The same error occurs when trying to use either Palm Desktop or the Control Panel through Safe Mode. A search of Google indicates this is a common problem, but I have been unable to find a resolution.

The fact the same access violation message appears when attempting to use either the Palm Desktop software or the Control Panel is unlikely to be a coincidence. Furthermore, since the problem persists in Safe Mode it doesn’t appear to be due to anything running in the background. The most likely cause is the Palm Desktop software, and the reason it also occurs when starting the control panel is the software may have installed a control panel applet for Palm. When you open the Control Panel, it attempts to load this control panel applet. When it cannot be loaded correctly, the access violation error message appears. This would explain why the problem still occurs in Safe Mode. So, the first method we can use to resolve the issue is uninstall the current version of Palm Desktop, then download and install the latest version of this software from the Palm website. Since you cannot uninstall Palm Desktop by opening the Control Panel and then going to the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel, we must use an alternative way. Fortunately, you can manually start the Add/Remove Programs control panel through a command. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘appwiz.cpl’ (without the quotes) then click OK. The Add/Remove Programs control panel should appear. Then, uninstall all Palm related software. Once the uninstallation has completed, restart the computer. After the computer has restarted, open the Control Panel to see if the problem has been resolved. Should all be working correctly, you now need to download the latest Palm Desktop software. Visit the support website for the Palm m505 (www.palm.com/au/support/m505) where you can download the latest software. Once it has downloaded, install the software then restart the computer. After the computer restarts, check whether you are able to open the software and control panel successfully.

In the event uninstalling Palm Desktop does not resolve the issue, there could still be remnants of this software on the computer. In an attempt to overwrite these remnants, try downloading and installing the latest version of Palm Desktop from the m505 support site. Hopefully, the newly downloaded copy should overwrite any files or configuration which was applied by the previous (bad) copy of the software. Once this has completed, restart and check whether you can use Palm Desktop and Control Panel.

Should the problem still persist, it is possible the original installation of Palm Desktop corrupted an essential Windows system file,. In this case, you may wish to try running the Windows System File Checker (SFC) utility, which will scan and replace any detected corrupt files. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ’sfc’ (without the quotes) and click OK. The SFC utility will begin operations. Once it finishes, it will exit silently with no feedback.