I couldn't take it. WM5 on my Axim 50v was killing me, and the last straw was its attempted murder of my battery.
I got to work in the AM and cabled it to the PC, expecting it to draw power. I came back from a 90 minute meeting to find the power down to 68%. I proceeded to re-connect it, only to find it wouldn't pick up the cable's presence. Now it was draining the battery just by connecting to the USB cable. Processor was stepped down to slowest, nothing running, but I could literally refresh the battery screen and see it degrade.
I shut it down, tried some tweaks off Aximsite. Even worse. I shut it off, brought it home at 6% power remaining. Helpful note: you cannot update the ROM unless you have a battery at 40% or more. Even swapping out the low battery with a fresh one did not matter, because WM5 insisted the new battery was low as well. More WM5 problems.
Dell helpfully provided a rollback ROM. It takes 35 minutes roundtrip: you cradle, perform the upgrade, hard reset, then walk away for fifteen minutes (otherwise you'll see the frozen startup icon and think it's not doing anything -- it is in fact doing its job).
Come back, do another hard reset, you're in business. If you're like me, you did a pre-WM5 backup and are now restoring it to the device. Good news is that I got back everything I liked about the Axim: speed, good battery life, a Wifi system that will connect to non-SSID-broadcasting routers, and stable application execution. I don't even hope WM5 gets fixed. It offered me nothing I liked, except maybe ActiveSync 4.0.
Hope this helps anyone struggling with this. I can elaborate on the registry tweaks if asked, although I have no desire to see my battery die in twenty minutes again.
-BrAp
