Repopulating data to a Treo 90 after a hard reset

Hi All I have a Handspring Treo 90. It ?has? a number of applications on it, most notably Datebk4 and Road Lingua. Recently, as I was sitting in the sun using Road Lingua to look up a Finnish word, I slipped while adjusting the screen contrast and the display greyed out. Completely. Not even a ghost was visible. A truly INSANE piece of programming. I panicked, not realising that I had simply pushed the contrast control to the limit. First I tried a soft reset. No change. I repeated the exercise several times. I went on the web and found out about warm resets and tried that. Still no use. It was time to do a hard reset and lose all the data I?d put in over the last couple of days. (I KNOW!!). I connected it to the laptop and tried a HotSynch. It worked! Before doing anything else, I then copied the entire C:/program files/Handsping folder to another directory, hoping that this would safeguard my pda data. Finally I did the hard reset. It worked. I could see again! VICTORY. The next step was to do a custom HotSynch to restore the data, but that is when the problem began to really get out of hand. I set the main databases so that the laptop overwrote the handheld. However, as had been the case once before many years ago, I couldn?t figure whether to do this for the System or not. In the end, still fearing that something was wrong with the pda I set this too for the laptop to overwrite the handheld. I clicked the HotSynch button. The HotSynch failed! At first it seemed Road Lingua was causing a problem but as I couldn?t see any obvious way to eliminate it from the HotSynch and reinstall it later, I simply tried again. The settings had remained the same: ?desktop overwrites handheld?. I then did another hard reset and tried again. This time I got as far as ?Cleaning up, please wait.? before it crashed. Finally I ?succeeded?, just by retrying and setting the handheld to overwrite the laptop for the System. But, now, although I can ?successfully? HotSynch the pda, as soon as I go into the Datebook it crashes and goes into a loop. It can?t be soft reset but needs a hard reset. The only info in the log that seems to give a clue to me in all this is the line: - Invalid handheld file deleted: C:\Program Files\Handspring\robin0\backup\Datebk4DB.PDB. Something is wrong with my main application DateBk4. There was one other issue that can be seen from the log, in that I was doing this over midnight. One other observation for what it?s worth is that in the Hanspring folder I copied for safety, there are two sub folders (my name/the pda?s name is Robin): ?Robin? and ?robin0?. However, now in the Handspring folder in Program Files there is only the subfolder ?robin0?. Odd? In terms of solving all this, my mother was dying at the time (!) and one of the uses for the pda that I rely on a lot is recording a daily Journal. It helps me make sense of things. So, I?ve been keeping on doing this on the laptop and there is quite a bit of data, especially in the Datebook, that I don?t want to lose. Can anyone suggest a way to recover from this that will GUARANTEE no loss of data? Please? I?ve run the battery flat reading that that may help but I think the problem is in some corrupted files somewhere . . . I?m using XP pro v.5.1SP2 on a Dell Inspiron 5160. Sorry for the length of this, and thanks, in anxious anticipation! Robin