Palm giveth and Palm taketh away

We reported last week that Palm had released the AKU2 update for the Palm Treo 700w and thus bringing push email capability to the popular phone.  Sometime over the past few days Palm has removed that update and 700w owners looking for it find this message on the update web site instead:

My guess is they are trying to correct some problems with the install process that has created problems for many owners.  I was fortunate to download the update when it first appeared and installed it but that process was not without problems.  The first thing that updaters were confronted with, including me, was the problem created by Palm using symbols in the MSI filename for the install.  This was very bad form for Palm and I hope they are fixing this.  The symbols caused the installer to fail when trying to access the MSI file due to the bad filename.  You had to manually correct that to get around and many inexperienced users were having problems with this as witnessed on enthusiast sites. 

The second problem that hammered some updaters was due to the situation with the Treo TEMP directory.  Apparently the first version of the Palm Treo 700w was creating thousands of 0 byte files in the TEMP directory which were never being deleted.  Palm’s update instructions mandated deleting these files immediately after the update using the Window Mobile File Explorer, a process that took many users 12 hours or more!  Using some third party system cleanup utilities would in fact delete them in seconds but many updaters did not know that and spent hours and hours cleaning out those TEMP files.  Of course, that was once you found the proper TEMP directory containing the files as the directory in the install directions was incorrect.

Hopefully fixing these problems in the install process are the only reason Palm has pulled the update.  As the message on the site indicates if you have already installed the update you don’t need to do anything else.  The update is worth it too, as it seems to handle memory much better than before.