"It's a lot like nature. You only have as many animals as the ecosystem can support and you only have as many friends as you can tolerate the bitching of." - Randy K. Milholland

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Last night, my iPod starting rebooting endlessly (accompanied by a strange whirring noise), and crashing iTunes when I connected it to my computer.

Apple help/forums had nothing on this problem (at least as far as preliminary Google searches went) so I had to go to 3rd-party ones.

I managed to get another computer to recognise the iPod as faulty after installing an older version of iTunes (the installer for iTunes 9 took forever to download, so I tried earlier versions first, the setup files for which downloaded much more quickly - despite being hosted on the same server).

However, restoring the iPod didn't work (even after installing iTunes 9 [which had FINALLY downloaded]) thanks to the famous error of yesteryear: Error 1418.

Error 1418 had infuriated so many people that a 1418hell.com site (now down but accessible through the Internet Archive) had been created.

Various fixes like re-registering my DLLs, changing USB ports, rebooting and installing the iPod shuffle Reset Utility (for the different driver) all didn't work.

In the end, I managed to fix my iPod by purposely corrupting it further (an incomplete format through Windows) and then restoring it.

As someone on a forum said, the iPod has more problems than Vista. Grr.

Damn you, Apple.