A while back, I upgraded my phone to the Sony Ericsson K800i. Once I’d received the phone, I also installed the Sony-Ericsson PC Suite, so I could synchronise the phone and my PC (something that’s always a pain in the arse anyway). Ever since then, I’ve had an error come up every time I start the PC, telling me that the CAPI_Worker module has crashed. It’s not a big problem, but it’s an annoying one, because it also meant that while I could connect my phone to the PC for moving files around and the like, I couldn’t actually sync it – I synced OK the first time I installed the PC suite, but then it wouldn’t connect any more.

Anyway, last night I did some furkling (also known as “fucking about on t’internet, and searching Google in particular”) about the problem, and then had a play on the PC. Sony Ericsson themselves insist there’s no problem, and that if the CAPI_Worker module is crashing, you’ve got a dodgy install of Windows. Only that’s not the answer at all – fortunately, I read someone else’s post about that before I tried re-installing Windows. But I did find a fix. After the more link, it gets a bit geeky…

Basically, the CAPI_Worker module expects to find a COM port. But if you don’t use COM ports in general, then the only one that’s in use is the USB one for your phone, which is only “on” when the phone is connected. So if the phone is connected to the PC at start-up, a COM port exists, and CAPI_Worker doesn’t complain.

However, if you start up without the phone connected (as most people do) then CAPI_Worker can’t find any active COM ports, and crashes. It expects to find at least one, and if there are none it crashes, and won’t run again – hence why the phone won’t connect for syncing, but will for file-transfer, which doesn’t use the CAPI_Worker module.

So the fix is to go into your “Add hardware” section of the control panel, go through all the guff, and add a new COM port as hardware. It takes a few minutes to go through and set it up, but then when you’re done, CAPI_Worker will be happy, because there’ll always be a COM port, even though it’s not being used for anything. Then when you connect the phone, it works, and is available for syncing. At last.

The full set of steps is this:

1. Start > Control Panel > Add Hardware
2. Windows searches for hardware to add, can’t find any.
3. When it says “Is the hardware connected?” select “Yes”. Next.
4. In the following list, go to the bottom, and “Add a new hardware device”. Next.
5. “Install the hardware that I manually select”. Next.
6. “Ports (COM & LPT)”. Next.
7. On the left, select “(Standard port types)” and on the right “Communications port”. Next.
8. Next.
9. Finish

And that’s it. 9 steps, and job done. You’ll need (as always with Windows) to do a restart at this point, so that CAPI_Worker can find the COM port and be happy.

After that, it’s all cool. I had to move the COM port to another COM number, as it initially dropped my wireless network connection, but that’s not really a struggle either.

Now it would just be nice if Sony Ericsson acknowledged this as an issue with their buggy software, rewrote the module so that it recognises there might not be an active COM port, and doesn’t crash every time, but there we go. At least there’s a fix now that actually works…