Have the reminders suddenly stopped showing up on your Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 based device? If so then you have come to the right place. I found the actual solution buried in this thread (post by rcmccart on 06-18-2006, 16:52) so I thought that I would try to make it more obvious and come up with reasons. This worked for me and I am hoping that this will also work for you; please let me know if it does or does not (post a comment on this blog entry). First, the solution.

1. Figure out when this problem started happening. If you vaguely remember when that was then that’s great, otherwise you can use something like MemMaid to find that by browsing the Notification Queue.
2. Set the date on the device to one day prior to when the reminders stopped appearing.
3. Soft reset the device.
4. Set the date to one day ahead of the date that you set.
5. If there was a reminder for this date then it should show up now. If you know there was a reminder but it just didn’t show up, then I am sorry this probably is not going to work for you. Oh, and make sure you pay attention to the time. If the reminder was set for 3pm but it’s currently 2:30pm then it is not going to show up because it is still in the future.
6. If you did see the reminder then you are on your way to getting the reminders back.
7. Change the date to the next day, soft reset and repeat until you reach today.

Now, the explanation. Please note that the following text is my explanation of what might be happening, I haven’t verified this with anyone, it’s all just me applying my logic 🙂 The problem seems to start with conflicting reminders; I am not sure of the exact reason, but whatever it is, causes a past reminder to be left on the Notification Queue as “new.” I am thinking that the reminders are saved in a chronological list, i.e. the earliest reminders at the top, followed by the later ones. Additionally there has to be some additional piece of data that is set the first a reminder is shown (some kind of “new” flag). The “notification daemon” then checks the earliest new reminders (i.e. with that piece set) and sets up an interrupt that will be called when the correct time comes. In this case the problem is that the earliest reminder will never come because the time has already passed. This causes the newer reminders to never come up because they are waiting in line for the earlier ones to appear. Considering the solution, this is what I think might be going on under the hood, but I am probably way off 🙂

I thought about creating a small utility that would get rid of the past notifications but as my last post mentioned, right now I am really, really busy. Maybe I will get to it in a month.