I have the same problem as another user. Upon Dan Stillman's request, I'm reposting my reply to her thread on "my own thread" (with an update at end) :

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Same problem here : I have been unable to sync a laptop for a few days (can't remember exactly how much).

Two other machines using he same account *DO* synchronize without problems. I even went to the extend of uninstalling Zotero from Firefox (Iceweasel), destroying the zotero directory, resetting the zotero-related variables in iceweasel configuration, then reinstalling Zotero and reconfiguring it. Same result : the sync tooltip has been saying "Obtention des données mises à jour à partir du serveur de synchronisation" ("Getting updated data from the synchronisation server")for 8 hours now (overnight). On another machine on which I'm typing this, I just got a successful synchronization a few seconds ago.

This is quite annoying, since that laptop is the machine small enough to be carried in libraries.

I am considering creating an alternate profile on the affected laptop and re-reinstalling Zotero in this new profile. Any advice *before* doing this ?

I have the *same* software setup on my three machines : Debian testing, Iceweasel (the "about" box of my current machine says "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; fr; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20101227 Iceweasel/3.5.16 (like Firefox/3.5.16)" ; same on my laptop, except that it says "i686" in lieu of "x86_64") ; on my laptop, I also had SQLite Manager 0.5.17, which I uninstalled, apparently to no avail...

There seems to be no way of getting an Error ID, since there is *no* error, just an unterminating sync....

Any advice, hint, tip would be welcome. As said previously, I plan to create a new profile on the affected machine if I find no other solution.

PS : I just left the "About" box of Iceweasel left open while completing the current post. The screen saver kicked in, then the Iceweasel display could *not* be restored, and I had to kill iceweasel, which seemed to eat a lot of CPU at the time. If this helps ...

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Update : I checked (again) the server by installing Zotero on yet another machine (also Debian/testing, Iceweasel) : after parametrization, the synchronization went fine. But then a miracle happened : the synchronization on my problem laptop got unstuck and restored all my data from the server. I can't remember if Iceweasel was even open at this time on the laptop...

Now maybe the "miracle" was some intervention from Dan Stillman (who was not sleeping by that time (about 11 PM in Washington), which is a wonder : Dan, does sleep ever happens to you ? :-).

I do *not* understand a thing about this problem, and wonder how to unstick myself if that happens again.

Any idea ?