Galaxy S2 not connecting to Kies v2.5.x

[Zapido]

Story: Sooooo, driven by the need to stay up to date I've rooted my Galaxy S2 and upgraded to Jelly Bean (via website : Update Samsung Galaxy S2 I9100 to Official Jelly Bean AOKP custom ROM ) from ICS and it looks great!!

Note : Before doing that, I made backups using (the utterly useless) Kies (and it worked).

Storm: After installation and rebooting and so on, it was time to sync my contacts to complete the mission....and Kies acted up.

Problem: Kies does not connect my phone, but keeps showing the "connecting..." window.
I have the latest Kies version, a recommended ROM and Windows 7 - 64bit.

Attempts: I have tried to dail *#7284# to set mobile to PDA - but it does not initiate, I have disabled USB Debugging, I have downloaded USB Drivers, used different USB ports, re-installed "msxml6.msi" and activated it by command prompt.
I have downloaded SLIM TW5 Jelly Bean v3.0 (SlimTW5-JellyBean-v3.0.zip) just now, thinking of trying that instead.

Save me : Any recommendations involving:
- Kies (alternative programs/methods to restore synced backup) or how to fix the connection problem;
- Recommended Jelly Bean ROM's.

THANKS for your patience (it's a long read and reasonably technical), I calmly await your recommendations!

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[UltraDroid]

Zapido, I know your frustrated but please watch your language in these posts. S-Bombs are totally inappropriate, even if disguised with *** type letters. I edited your earlier post to remove one.

[Zapido]

Sure, sorry about that...!

[thepitcanary]

Thought i'd chip in with a different 'answer' to backup not working between Samsung Galaxy S2 on Kies on Mac OS X ...

No idea how you'd go about all this log deleting on the Mac, and i've been having this problem now for months - Kies for Mac (OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8), even the latest version of Kies, would see my S2 (running Android 4.0.4) but backups would hang, endlessly 'preparing' for backup.

However, today i set USB debugging mode to 'on' and tried to back up - bingo, works fine. It shouldn't (early Kies wouldn't see the S2, as i remember) with USB debugging set to 'on') but it has.

I hope this helps others. i'm now off to repost this in two other threads on this forum about the same thing!