I’ve poured over Trimble’s support material but there isn’t really anything that describes COM port conflict resolution besides “Turn off the application using the port.” Yeah, that helps.
Growing ever desperate, I backed up the unit and did a hard reset. This removed TerraSync (uh-oh) and failed to resolve the GPS/PocketPC connection problem, so I restored the backup (whew).
What I don’t get is how to restart the GPS service without being connected to it. A hard restart didn’t help, and there’s no way to communicate with the device with the COM3 conflict. I guess I’ll head in to the lab and see if there are any other experience-hardened individuals there who know how to fix this. Or maybe let me use a different unit.