I've been successfully using my iPhone and syncing it to this computer for a long time. In fact, right now, I can press the sync button and it correctly updates my Outlook contact list and my Notes in the iPhone.

In the past, I had always opted to manually manage the music and videos on the phone. (The checkbox in iTunes "manually manage music and videos" was checked.) Worked fine. I could drag songs directly from the hard disk onto the phone and they would work.

Recently, I was having trouble with my computer taking forever to boot up when it was connected to my corporate network. I finally realized it was because of a gigantic user profile, because applications keep stuffing large things into the user profile folder that they shouldn't be. So I cleaned out a bunch of huge stuff out of there, including all the music in the itunes folder in the profile (it was a different set of music than what was on the iphone anyway), all of the huge backups of older versions of the iphone firmmware, older backups of the iPhone itself, etc. This, combined with other cleaning out of my 4+gig user profile, got my computer to boot at a normal speed again.

But now, in iTunes, the "manually manage" checkbox has somehow become unchecked. In fact all the checkboxes are unchecked except the ones that sync my outlook contacts.

Because the "manually manage" checkbox got somehow unchecked, I can't drag any new songs onto the iPhone or do any editing of the songs that are on the iPhone already. They are all grayed out.

When I try to check the checkbox to "manually manage", it says it's going to completely erase the iphone. NO!!!!! NO!!!!! NO!!!!! I had *already* manually managed this iphone, and I just want to keep doing it now. It's critical that I don't erase it right now.

How do I check that checkbox without erasing the iphone?

All my google searches either say:

1. Just check the checkbox and all is well. Those posts don't seem to talk about the erasing part.

2. They say you have to erase it because it was originally synched with a different computer. This is not true, it's only ever synched with this computer, and it was ALWAYS set to "manually manage" for its entire life.

Help?