For me as well Bluetooth has only ever been an unmitigated disaster.

I have had three prolonged encounters with Bluetooth:

- pairing a BT GPS with my Dell PocketPC
- pairing a Sony phone with a Sony laptop running Sony's own BT stack on WinXP
- pairing a selection of Windows Mobile phones with MSFT's stack on WinXP

In all cases the experience was just awful. The PocketPC would regularly require a reboot to get it to see the GPS, after the two had been turned off for a couple of minutes.

The Sony laptop required over 50 mouse clicks (I counted them) to pair and setup the modem. That wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't then regularly (every day or so) lose its pairing and force you to start again from scratch.

The vanilla XP + WinMo was the most successful, but even then it would fail often enough that I gave up and went back to IRDA to connect to my phone's modem.

I haven't touched BT since, it cost me too many days of pain. My RF Logitech mouse in comparison works flawlessly.

I can't even really blame it on MSFT, as in the Sony-Sony case it wasn't even their BT stack involved.