It appears that the problem has something to do with a corrupt entry in my address book (obviously; duh!). If I entirely delete the contents of my address book then the Grafitti problem goes away.

It took a lot of steps to zero in on this fact, and for the record, neither the Palm Desktop “Tools | Options… | Tools | Check and repair any corrupted records” not Pimlico’s DBScan software could spot any records which are corrupt.

I called Palm Support and spoke to a really helpful chap who basically confirmed that I’d already taken all the steps he’d have walked me through and that the quickest resolution was to re-add the records one at a time until I found the problem.

To be sure, I deleted all the records using Palm Desktop then sync’d – and LO, the problem was gone – note I exported all the records as a backup first) – so now I have to re-add the records one by one…

In fact, to save time, IÂ’ll be adding the first 50% of the records – and if the grafitti still works IÂ’ll continue adding 50% of whatÂ’s left I can find the problem in the most efficient manner. It seems my studies of sorting algorithms have hitherto untapped benefits for normal human endeavour.