For the past 8 days I have tirelessly attempted to get MobileMe working on my personal Macbook Pro (Leopard). I have followed several threads on Apple's forums where many others were experiencing the same issues. I've been active on this thread and this one as I attempted various things and worked with other users on the problem.

Within the last 15 minutes I was successful syncing to MobileMe. This is what worked for me.

According to others on the threads, Apple has recommended folks try and sync from a fresh user account. Well, I have a second Macbook Pro (office computer) so I decided to sync from it. I went into System Preferences, selected .Mac and waited for a minute. When the MobileMe update showed up I installed it. I then quit System Preferences, then immediately relaunched it. I entered my MobileMe username (without the @me.com) and typed my password. I noticed something odd, that my password seemed shorter than what I had entered on my personal Macbook Pro. Nevertheless I signed in, checked the box for "Synchronize with MobileMe" and it in fact worked. I was able to select a syncing interval (I chose Automatic) as well as Calendars, Contacts, and Bookmarks. I then switched over to my main (personal) Macbook Pro and went through the same steps, manually typing my MobileMe password, choosing sync preferences, and then doing an initial sync.

Within one to two minutes I was logging into me.com and verifying my Calendars and Contacts were online. Oddly, I don't see a place where Bookmarks show online. I then set up my iPhone and configured Calendars, Contacts and Bookmarks for push syncing. This caused all three types of data to be overwritten with data from MobileMe. It all seemed to work very well.

So what was the problem? I use an /excellent/ password storage program called 1Password. It makes it super super easy to use really strong passwords on every site. Since 1Password also stores a bookmarklet in Safari on the iPhone I'm able to easily log-in to all my Web sites without having to remember nearly 100 passwords. Sidenote: 1Password has released a new native iPhone app that will be available in a week or so from the App Store. What I realized, is that every time I was trying to sign-in to and sync with MobileMe from my main (personal) Macbook Pro, I was copying the password from the 1Password OS X app using a little "Copy" button the software provides. I was then pasting the clipboard contents into the MobileMe sign-in screen. While I have verified the 1Password copy button was not adding characters to my password (by pasting into TextEdit), it does not work with the MobileMe sign-in screen. After typing in my MobileMe password by hand I was in business on my personal Macbook Pro.

I'm confused as to whether the MobileMe sign-in screen was actually signing me in correctly, or just allowing me to see my account info and then passing an invalid password when I attempted to synchronize (as this was the error that showed up in the OS X Console). Regardless, I FINALLY have everything working now.

I would be VERY interested to hear from any other users that may be using 1Password and performing the same steps I was. If you fall into this category, reply to this post and let me know.