iTunes hangs during syncing of contacts and calendars

By Jay, on January 13th, 2010

I have had my iPhone 3GS for about a month now and have not had a single problem with it, until yesterday.
When I try to sync my phone is just hangs at the ‘syncing contacts’. I decided to remove the syncing of my contacts from outlook and try sync again, this time is hangs at ‘syncing calendar’.
I removed the sync from the calendar and the sync then went through fine, however my phone is pretty useless without my contacts and calendar.

What caused the problem? :
I noticed that this occurred shortly after I had installed the new Facebook application update. This new update allows Facebook to search your contacts on your iPhone, compare them to the Facebook database, and then download all your friends profile pictures and attach them to your contacts.

I synced my iPhone to my Outlook (which out of interest is running on Windows Vista), and all my contacts in outlook were updated with their new pictures. All future syncing of my iPhone and Outlook would fail from this point onwards.

The Solution:
After fiddling for hours trying to find the best way to resolve this issue, I did the following

1: Open iTunes
2: Click on ‘Edit – Preferences’
3: Select the ‘Devices’ tab at the top
4: Click on ‘Reset Sync History’
5: Sync your iPhone
6: Smile that your problem has gone away ?

My Setup:

1/ Outlook 2007
2/ Windows Vista Home Edition
3/ iTunes Version 9
4/ iPhone 3GS 16GB

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