This is wild... I've been on vacation for two weeks. Being the addict that I am, I went to check my email in bed -- before coffee so the details are a bit fuzzy -- and I crashed... when I reset, i had bsod. So I did a hard reset, totally confident that I would be able to restore from the backup buddy on my card. I've done that two or three times and it always works flawlessly. This time, however, my card appeared blank. nothing in it. Thousands of miles from home, without a cradle, I had to just sever the ties till I got back to my desktop. It was a painful, but enlightening experience. I CAN live for extended periods -- two, three days -- without full functionality.
Well, I'm home now, and after copying my desktop backup file to a safe place and removing the sd card from the phone, I performed a restore from my mac (osx). I was delighted to find all the third party apps restored. My hope was that I could replace the card and magically, it would be able to be read. (I put the card in a reader and was able to see all the files, so I had hope that something was preventing the 7135 from reading the files even though they still existed.) Oddly, the card was restored to the same place as the desktop... i.e., despite the fact that the card was backed up automatically every night, backup buddy reported the last sync as being two weeks ago, precisely when I last did a desktop backup before my vacation-- I say vacation, but I did an awful lot of work during those two weeks, made painfully evident by the difference of my last desktop hot sync.

I'm glad to be only two weeks out, but I thought I'd throw this one at you geniuses to see if you had any thoughts. I'm stumped.

Update. I was able to put the card in the reader, copy the backup file to my palm folder, and re-sync. This provided the latest backup. Too tired to even begin to surmise why the card showed the accurate last hot sync when in the reader, but an earlier version when in the phone.

I *think* when you backup to your SD card using backupbuddy a complete set of files is written, then the previous backup is deleted. That is what the "removing orphaned files" means during the last stage of the backup. If the removing orphaned files stage is interrupted (power loss?) than you might have two sets of files (or links to the old files) on the card which may confuse the phone.

Just my .02, merely conjecture on my part.