Martin, you should be able to check gpilotd's output in ~/.gnomerc-errors ...It's like: it worked first time, failed about a dozen times. A got frustrated, turned off Evo conduits and turned on normal backup. And it worked that time - I turned on Evo again as well it failed and has ever since.Uhm, and whats the gpilotd output with the Evo conduits enabled ? If something goes wrong during loading the conduits (I doubt I've spend much time in handling that), it might cause the device to timeout.
Also, this sounds a lot like the behavior that I reported last Thursday and Friday (10/11,12) in a couple fairly detailed messages -- see the thread entitled "Weird gpilotd behavior" ... Look and see if this describes the behavior you're seeing -- maybe it can save you some work and the list some duplication ...
BTW, after I posted that thread, sync started working more regularly (for a few syncs, anyway), just long enough for me to discover the Evo bug that was royally screwing up all my address book data -- at which point I killed Evo, turned off gnome-pilot, and reverted back to my latest JPilot database (thank god I had sync'ed to JPilot before playing with Evo!); since then I've just continued to use JPilot. I haven't tried lately to use either gnome-pilot or Evo, because I'm a bit gun-shy after that experience (sorry, Eskil, for lumping gnome-pilot in with Evolution on the screw-up scale :-/ ).
-Phil