Apple tech support posts an informative document on getting the new iPods to work with Windows. These notes are better than the official knowledge base articles and describe my problems exactly, which appear to be common. In particular, it confirms some conclusions I made yesterday. The tech support message even has notes on how to deal with their misbehaving software. A choice quote: "MusicMatch Jukebox may not be the best program to use with the iPod."

Because Windows saw the iPod as a drive just fine, I went ahead and formatted it as FAT32. Of course, this obliterated the iPod software (which now has to be restored by the Updater), but I was mighty impressed that the iPod became a nifty tiny portable Firewire hard drive. Stores files and everything, and transfers mighty fast. Furthermore, this appears to have been the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, the support message doesn't seem to be enough in my case, so I've got my own sob story in the iPod for Windows Apple support forum. But it's nice to see that my problems appear to be common to some (so I'm not alone) but not common to all (so there are functional Windows set-ups out there that I can aspire to). That I have a Mac with which it is known to work, that it works as a Firewire hard drive with Windows just fine, and that Apple tech support is recommending existing third-party iPod software to work with the new iPods, are all encouraging enough that I don't mind so much that Giggy can't play tunes at the moment. (Yes, its name is Giggy. I reserve the right to name anything that costs me more than $500.)

[I plan on being especially verbose about my iPod problems for the sake of incoming Google searchers experiencing similar problems. There's a dearth of iPoddish blog material at the moment which I hope to rectify. Please bear with me.]