I am having A LOT of troubles with my IPod, all of them relating to connectivity with my PC. I use WinXP-Pro, with a TI 1394 card.

Whenever I try to either read from or write to the IPod hard drive through my PC, the IPod hangs. It takes 5-10 tries to copy an album up to the IPod, and I have still not been able to copy down a song.
(I want to back it up so that I can try formatting it)

Moreover, IPod hangs when windows boots with it installed - because windows starts checking it as it would check a normally installed harddrive after a bad shutdown. This freezes IPod, and consequently windows - the IPod needs to be removed, the PC restarted. Why am I shutting down the PC improperly in the first place? Well, it seems that sometimes inserting the IPod into the dock makes windows decide to restart out of the blue.

I have already uninstalled Apple software (never had MMJB - I used ephPod), but the problem did not seem to go away.

Note that the PC *ALWAYS* detects the IPod when I connect it, and assigns it a drive letter, and it pretty much never freezes when I'm using it to play music, it just seems to have real issues with the PC. One thing I noticed is that some of the songs end abruptly on the IPod, even though I know that the original MP3 file did not have this problem.