It all started a few days ago...

I have a 30 Gig 3G ipod for windows with win XP, using musicmatch to load music

When i browsed through my ipod to select it song, instead of playing it, it would start shuffling to the next song and then the next song, never playing anything. To fix this i just reset my ipod and everything was fine. One day though, i reset my ipod and it booted up with a folder and a little exclamation point flashing and turned right off.
When i got back home i plugged my ipod in and windows didn't recognize the format. It opened up the updater and requested that i restore my ipod. I clicked on restore and the firmware doesn't even load up. There's no apple sign with a little progress bar on the ipod, instead i get a stupid check mark that says its OK to disconnect the ipod even though its alredy disconnected. The updater just sits there supposedly almost finished not doing anything.
On one occasion i actually got the firmware to flash (I upgraded to 2.1), I reloaded all my music back on and was temprorarly happy. But when i plugged my ipod back in i got that same message saying that the ipods format isn't recognizeable. Its been stuck on disk mode for as long as i can remember. I've tried resetting and then holding down the ff and rw buttons at the same time, its still stuck on disk mode.
Now when i try to restore my ipod it gives me an error saying that it can't unmount the ipod. I took the advice of yanking it out and plugging it in to a power source. The firmware still doesn't install. It's still stuck on disk mode with the check sign.
I'm getting really angry with apple, there seems to be no support. These things are really expensive, I just got it at the end of July and its messed up already. I've been working on it for a while. I heard 2.1 stinks and so i uninstalled all the software that came with the ipod (including musicmatch) and deleted the ipod folder. I reinstalled everything with just 2.0 and i still have the same problem.

Please help my ipod work again!