Right now i'm at war with my iPod. It's a iPod Video 80GB. Current iPod software is 1.3. My Vista desktop is not currently recognize my iPod and is asking me to restore. This would be the 5 or 6th restore in the last month. Let me go through the timeline:

I sync'd my iPod via Belkin TuneSync USB Hub overnight. The next morning, iTunes said the sync was complete, but the iPod continued the "Do Not Disconnect" screen. No problem, as in the 1.5 years?? I've owned this puppy. Anyway, after removing, playlists were missing and some were blank. the ipod was in disarray. I re-plugged in the iPod and it couldn't recognize it, asking to restore. So I restored. But on reboot it went into a reboot loop.

I was able to get the iPod into a Disk Mode and i was able to restore the iPod and sync once again. It recognized it as a "new" iPod and wanted to resync the entire library by default. Too much data, so it did it's own "selection". I didn't want that option. So I canceled the sync, and set up the playlists, podcasts, videos lists the way I wanted it to sync. with the over 60GB of data being transferred this of course takes a while. I was having some problems with songs not fully transferred (30 seconds skip to next song, etc). So I decided to re-sync again... again it didn't recognize/restore and so on.

I fought with this for a couple of days. Then I decided to try syncing the iPod with my laptop, to see if I could get better results. The library on the laptop is much smaller and I figured if perhaps I could get the syncing to work over there... I could make the laptop the main computer. The laptop runs XP.

The laptop didn't recognize iPod, and ran the restore (the vista restore seemed like a silent install) on XP it ran through a GUI install, which was different so I thought that was going to work for me. The sync worked. And there was joy in mudville. I researched the multiple computer scenario and the Home computer versus secondary computer. Because my library is on the Vista, I want that to be the Home computer for auto syncing (and set up manual syncing on the laptop).

When I synced the iPod back to the Vista machine, it gave me the appropriate message, regarding "this iPod is synced with another computer do you want to erase and re-sync?" Yes. Then I was able to set up my Plalyists etc... Bingo Pow. The iPod was back to normal. A cease fire was declared.

But now I want to re-sync. Update playcounts. Transfer new purchases on to the iPod. Get new podcasts. You know. Go back to normal.

Re-sync (no longer using the TuneSync) direct USB iPod connection. And once again, "iTunes does not recognize your iPod please click restore".

At this point I think it's the Vista machine that is at issue, NOT the iPod. Should I uninstall and re-install iTunes?

Should I just make the laptop the primary computer and sync via the network (the vista machine has a huge hard drive) the laptop could not handle the size? Or Should I move the library to an external drive?