I had orginally posted this on my personal site, but thought I would repost it here so that it is available to a wider audience. Instead of reposting the entire thing, I will give a short summary of the problem we encountered and how we fixed it.

After installing the software included with the iPod, we were getting registry errors when we would reboot the computer. I tried uninstalling what came on the disc and downloaded everything from the Apple site. That got rid of the errors, but every time we tried to load songs on the iPod and then listen to them, we got the dreaded blinking green and orange light. I hit the Apple support forums. Found a few references to similar problems. Then it hit me like a brick.

Apparently, the next letter available to the OS for any sort of physical hard drive was E. However, we had a network drive mapped using that letter. Because the iPod Shuffle (as well as the other models) are essentially hard drives, Windows needs to be able to assign a letter to it so that it can write data to it. As soon as I disconnected the network drive, Windows was able to properly assign a drive letter to the iPod and all was well with the world again.

So, a tip if you are using the iPod Shuffle (or possibly any iPod) on a PC. Make sure the next letter in the drive sequence is available for the OS to assign to the iPod.

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