Generalities:

System -> Editor for /etc/sysconfig -> search for "hotplug", make sure HOTPLUG_START_USB is set. Hotplug works very well on 8.2 - big improvement over 7.x where it hardly worked at all, and 8.1 where it was spotty. You can pick hotplug classes to start (net, pci, ieee1394, usb...)

I'd avoid serial interfaces - serial gets configured at boot so the thing would probably need to be present then for smooth operation. Clearly a PDA is a hotplug device. There is no serial hotplug.

There are 4 jpilot packages in 8.2, I assume they are installed.

jpilot is GTK+, make sure gtk2, glib2, and pango are installed. If GNOME is installed, these things are probably already there - off and on I've had to manually bring in components to run particular apps, since I don't have GNOME installed beyond the bare minimum.

Need more specifics - don't have a PDA so can't guarantee results.