[BTM] Problems enabling bluetooth

[Jaime Gomez-Hernandez]

Hi,

I have a Titanium Powerbook with no bluetooth built-in. I bought one 
of the bluetooth dongles from an Apple official distribution store. I 
plugged in the dongle, and was able to use my T68i as a wireless 
modem both for GSM and GPRS connections. I also played with Romeo for 
wireless control of my Powerpoint presentatins. Once! I tried to 
repeat the feat in front of some colleagues to show how cool 
Bluetooth is, with no success.

After many trials and a few hours wasted I found a pattern of actions 
that allows me to re-enable bluetooth. At that time, I was running 
OSX 10.2.4, now it is 10.2.6 and the problem persists. This is the 
sequence: I have to unplug the dongle, shutdown the computer, plug 
the dongle, boot the computer, and half of the times the dongle is 
recognized after boot up, and works. Some times the dongle is 
recognized (the B appears in the menu bar not crossed-out) but when 
going into the bluetooth preferences, the name of the computer is not 
recognized and no devices appear in the device list, the other half 
of the times, the name of the computer appears as in the sharing 
preferences, and the devices that had been added to the list of 
devices re-appear. If I then set the computer to sleep and unplug the 
dongle, there is no way that the computer will recognize it again 
unless I go through the tedious process of unplugging, shutting down 
and rebooting again.

I have read that similar things have happened to other users, and 
would like to know if there is any solution to re-enable Bluetooth 
without having to shut down. Removing a preference file? Killing a 
process? or what else?

Maybe it is a problem with the system extensions I have installed, I 
have not tried to deactivate them, but they are: Dave, MaxMenus, 
DefaultFolder, FruitMenu and WindowShade.

Any help, appreciated!

Jaime