It's as if the conduit said to itself, "Self, why did Fredlet do that? I think she's insane so I'll just duplicate this record. That way if she ever emerges from this temporary insanity, she won't have lost any information."

You get the gist of it. To avoid this impugning of my sanity, (not to mention that it's annoying to have duplicate records in my device) all I (and you'd) have to do is go into the HotSync setup and choose "PalmPilot overwrites desktop" for each of the categories, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

In the HotSync Custom settings, choose "PalmPilot Overwrites Desktop" for the Datebook, Address, To Do and Memo categories. Click picture for a larger image.

Two Palm devices, one Palm Desktop
Another scenario is performing HotSync operations with two or more Palm devices on one computer. Performing HotSync operations with different user names is a breeze. After I have performed a HotSync operation with my Palm device and Joe Bob (the Joe Bob Briggs obsession continues) is ready to do his, the conduit will look at the user name and recognize that 'Joe Bob' is in fact NOT the same as 'fredlet' and switch users on the Palm desktop. I really recommend this option if you have two Palm geeks in the household both performing HotSync operations on the same computer.

Co-dependent Palm devices
I have yet to come up with a solution for what I refer to as "the co-dependant Palm devices." It involves having a couple with two Palm devices and one database. This situation often also applies to the boss and the secretary who want to keep their schedules in sync.

These folks want to be able to HotSync all their records together, so they have matching data for both people. Every time I've tried to make this work using only the desktop software, it took about 20 steps and, in the end, usually duplicated some records or, even worse, precluded either person making ANY changes on either Palm device during the day. That would definitely be unacceptable to me since I can't imagine using the Palm computer as a read-only device.

There are other options if you really want to go the shared-database route. Using the PalmIII's IR capability almost gets round this issue where you can beam an address category to another PalmPilot with IR as well. The drawback here is that you'd pretty much have to delete a given category before receiving the data so that you wouldn't duplicate records.

I'll be exploring this issue more in the future and reporting if I find a better solution.