"I've noticed that some of our application users have this annoying habit of poking the reset hole on PocketPCs when things are taking their time to complete.

Of course, this interrupts the intensive database activity, and corrupts the database file causing them even longer delays.
...
Unfortunately that does not seem to fix the problem - though on WM5.0
...

Palms don't suffer from the issue, BTW."

Fix? Don't do that.

Bob