How To: Running WMDC on Windows 10

Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) 6.1 may experience difficulty running on PCs using Windows 10. Connecting the Datalogic device may not cause WMDC to start and ActiveSync communications will not work. The following troubleshooting steps can be used to get WMDC working correctly.

• First, try un-installing and re-installing WMDC 6.1. In some cases, this is enough to allow WMDC to operate correctly. See links earlier in the Prerequisites section of this document.

• WMDC uses two system services, Rapimgr and Wcescomm. Rapimgr’s service name is Windows Mobile-based device connectivity and Wcescomm’s service name is Windows Mobile-2003-based device connectivity.

• These two must share a kernel semaphore and be started in the same shared svchost.exe. However, by default, in the Windows 10 Creators Update, svchost.exe will not allow this. The fix is to add the SvcHostSplitDisable flag to the registry for both services. You can achieve this by doing the following: Start > type Cmd.

Right-click on the Command Prompt result and click Run as administrator.

o At the Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device? Prompt click ‘Yes’.

o Enter the following 2 lines at the Command Prompt window:

REG ADD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RapiMgr /v SvcHostSplitDisable /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f 
REG ADD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WcesComm /v SvcHostSplitDisable /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

The RapiMgr service can occasionally crash when the device disconnects from the system. To allow Windows to always restart the service anyways, do the following: o Start > type Services.

o Click on the Services result.

o Scroll down and locate Windows Mobile-based device connectivity, and then double click on it.

o Click the Recovery tab.

o Set Subsequent failures to Restart the Service.

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Repeat the same steps for the Windows Mobile 2003-based device connectivity service.

  • Restart your PC. Afterwards, WMDC should operate normally.

More information can be found in this post on Microsoft Technet.

See also: How To: Where to download Microsoft WMDC (Windows Mobile Device Center)

Simone Callegari
Datalogic Mobile Products Specialist - L3 SW Engineer