Windows Live Sync Beta “Sorry” Errors

I’m in the process of updating my Mesh-and-Sync empire to the new Sync.

On all of the Server operating systems (all 2008 R2), I’d install the new Live Sync Beta, and then find that they reported something along the lines of:

“Sorry, there is a problem with the sync servers. Please try again in a few minutes”

…Only I waited, and it never got any better. On the second server where I experienced this problem, I figured there must have been something wrong at the client end.

My TMG proxy logs showed multiple attempts to connect to login.live.com before the failure (all successful, but doing it three times suggests a failure condition to me).

Figuring it was something credential-related, I browsed to Hotmail and signed in with my current passport (Windows Live ID – I’d undergone an account merge/migration a while back to switch email addresses), and noticed my old WLID email address was offered on all these machines.

Once I’d signed into Hotmail with my current credentials, the error went away.

So: local cached credentials broken; using the browser seems to have fixed it on all three servers where I had this problem.

So far: Love the new Remote Desktop features, which are an improvement over Mesh, but I miss the activity view from the old Foldershare-based Sync.