iTunes backup hangs

After I upgraded to iPod Touch 3.0 my first sync resulted in a backup that appeared to hang after more than an hour.

I searched for some suggetsions about this, but most of them appeared a bit desperate (such as removing all apps from your iPod and trying again).

As the whole OS just got upgraded, I would expect that the first backup would take longer (making assumptions here about how it actually backs up) so just trying again, assuming most of it got backed up before the hang, may work for you.

Note that if you are in a hurry and want to sync and move on, you can just hit the X to the right of the backup status window to stop the backup.

After I aborted the first long running backup, I just synced my iPod and then did a manual backup. (right click on your iPod in iTunes devices list and select Back Up.

Your mileage may vary, but I'd suggest you try this and be a little patient for the first few times before you go deleting all you apps (and have to download them all again).

Windows does not remember my passwords

I'd had an issue for months now, where many of my applications could not remember passwords. This included Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Google Notifier, Google Calender Sync and others,

Most of these apps would at least keep the passwords for the life of my login, but Outlook would prompt me each time I checked mail.

I googled for an answer and tried the Protected Storage System Fix (Method 3 in the link), to no avail, so I have been tolerating this for a few months now. What is odd, is that other acconuts in the same system do not suffer from this.

Today I searched again, as typically you put in a slightly different search and end up with different suggestions.

Thankfully, this one here helped me resolve the problem.

I'm posting this to increase the link count for that post, in the hopes that others find a working solution quicker than I did.