[This blog is moving to http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable]

I have just had a 2 hour battle with Live Mesh which has reminded me just how much I have come to rely on Live Mesh in my day to day life and how well it normally works (It gets the “It just works” tick)

I am currently regularly using:

• A Vista machine with VS2008 SP1 – when I need stability and to just get things done.
• A Vista machine with a daily build of VS2010 – for some .NET 4.0 stuff I am doing such as parallel
• A Vista VPC running the CTP of VS2010 from the PDC – when I need a more stable (but less feature complete) build of VS2010
• A Windows 7 Beta machine running VS2008 – when I want to play with Windows 7 :-)

In the past I would have tried to keep these things in sync with Goodsync (Which is still great software – but fiddly for so many machines and folders and is only peer to peer) but I now rely 100% on Live Mesh to do this.

Which is why I was rather upset to realise that all the work I had done yesterday on VS2010 had not been synced to my other machines. Live Mesh was broken for that machine for one folder  - “My Projects”. The cause –  a bug in Live Mesh but a bug triggered by me.

On all my machines I sync “My Projects” to “C:\My Projects”. But yesterday I noticed I had accidentally synced to “C:\Projects” on this one machine. I went into explorer and renamed “C:\Projects” to “C:\My Projects” and all seemed well. Except Live Mesh was no longer syncing. This is when Live Mesh got confused. I tried:

• Tell Live Mesh to sync to “C:\My Projects” – no joy
• Tell Live Mesh To stop syncing and start again – no joy
• On Live Desktop to stop syncing to my machine and start again – no joy
• To delete the Sync for the folder – no joy
• To delete the folder from Live Desktop – no joy
• And pretty much every sequence combination – no joy

The most common error I was getting was:

“Request to MOE failed with status code 404 Resource not found”

In the past I have uninstalled Live Mesh when faced with this sort of issue – but luckly I found this handy post. The suggestion to stop Live Mesh and delete the Store folder which for me was “C:\users\ericnel\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Live Mesh\GacBase\Store”. It worked a treat. All is now well with Live Mesh again and I can get back to doing some proper work!

UPDATE:  One of the mesh team contacted me with this helpful advice:

If you hit an issue post a description of the issue to http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/LiveMesh/threads/ so that the team can follow up. Ideally before you delete your store, run the “Collect Live Mesh Logs” utility from the start menu, which places a .cab file full of diagnostic info on the desktop. That can be sent through later if the team ask for it.