Do you have an IR receiver connected to LIRC, or just an IR transmitter?

If you have an IR receiver, you can use LIRC to learn the signals from your PDA to diagnose what is wrong with them.

The original learned signal you posted in this thread was learned by your PDA, correct?

If your LIRC IR transmitter doesn't work at first, you have a way to learn the signals it transmits and decode them with IrTool and see what might be wrong. That isn't as informative as the reverse (learning the PDA's signals with LIRC) but anything that gives you details is better then the pass/fail testing with the actual device.

All my IR receive and transmit hardware is on Windows and Dos computers and none of it is compatible with winLIRC. I recently installed Debian Linux on one computer, but I haven't had time to set up hardware to try LIRC.