I am a new iPod user, so maybe I'm doing something wrong. Here is my situation:
I have a music library of about 7500 songs. I want to use smart playlists and so have been trying to go through and rank songs.

The first time I did this, I ranked about 600 songs and then tried to sync with iTunes. The application froze and after a couple of minutes, I got scared and disconnected the iPod from the PC (even though it said not to do so on iTunes and the iPod as it was connected - although not yet saying 'syncing') iTunes seemed to be 'frozen' - ie - the screen was locked and unresponsive. I closed iTunes via the task manager and rebooted the iPod. Everything seemed fine, but I lost all of my ratings. I did a bit of research on iLounge and found out that the iPod doesn't necessarily write song ratings to the iPod when you rate the songs - rather - it stores the ratings in internal memory and writes all of the ratings at once. It clearly stated that rebooting the iPod prior to writing the ratings would result in loosing all of the ratings saved to date.

So, I figured that maybe I overreacted and unplugged the iPod to soon. I tried again - this time rating only 150 songs. I tried to sync again. Again - iTunes seemed to freeze up, but rather than unplug the iPod, I let it sit and went on to do something else. When I came back a half an hour later - I saw an error message on the screen that said my iPod was corrupted and needed to be restarted. I tried to eject the iPod from iTunes, but nothing happened on my iPod. I left it connected for a while, but eventially (an hour later) disconnected it and rebooted. Again - I lost my ratings.

Is anybody else having a similar problem? Is there anyway to create ratings on the classic and sync iTunes? Please help! Thanks!