It turns out that this mightily confuses the AvantGo reader I am so used to. Despite several upgrade attempts from (gasp!) windoze and directly (nice hints are here and here (though you may need to be logged in) via pilot-xfer, it would sync nicely but never get the reader software going. At first I was confronted with 'AvGoPimPod1 not a shared library'. Deleting libmal and installing libsmal from the 'palm executables' bundle fixed that. But still no reader. It continued to babble about channels -- I guess that's their commercial product for intra-company news transmission.
Well, another attempt his morning fixed that. Deleting AGConnect, AvantGo and libmal before reinstalling them along with a new definition of the server in AGConnect did the trick. While the info is exactly the same as before, this seems to sail around whatever bug was blocking me before. I'm happy.
Now if only the other channels would use a smaller font just like the venerable Globe & Mail does so that one gets more mileage out of the neato 320x320 display...