Bought my wife a 3G in Singapore last year and it worked fine with her PC and iTunes combination until about a month ago. We then started to experience what appears to be the growing problem reported here - namely the Pod causes the host computer to freeze, crash or reset.

We have 4 PCs in this house - a bog standard Athlon 2000 workhorse which the Pod was originally synched to, a Compaq Presario 3000 laptop, a Media Centre Shuttle and my own home-grown over-clocked ridiculous PC.

The iPod freezes and crashes all of these machines, each of which has a different firewire chipset (2 machines are on the Apple compatibility list). Unlikely to be the PCs methinks....

The list of errors includes:

1) Freezing - the host machine will just lock up until the iPod is removed and will then merrily carry on.

2) Blue Screen of Death - the 'corrupted_mmpool' driver error.

3) Some machines will recognise the iPod in the list of removable devices and assign it a drive letter - attempting to access that drive (in disk mode as well) causes a crash / freeze/

4) Attaching the iPod in 'Disk Mode' often causes a hard reset of all the PCs.

Sound familiar to some of you ??!! Well... I bumped the iPod into diagnostic mode and ran the HDD Scan. Or rather I tried to.... the Pod reports the 'Start' message and sits like that for hours. I gave up after leaving it overnight. Every other diagnostic reports OK.

So... ladies and gents - I think the problem here is not your computers, not your firewire chipset, not your drivers, not Itunes, not XP-SP2... it's another fault with the iPod. Our original host computer has not changed (it's not even connected to the internet) since the iPod was first installed which means that the damn Pod is the guilty cuplrit. Q.E.D.

I think it's the HDD, judging by the scan failure and the fact that the thing refuses to spin down the drive whilst it attempts to connect / synch.

Personally (and I know all of you will disagree :) ) , I think they are overpriced, underperforming, badly made bits of good-looking tat. However, it's what my wife wants, so I'm doomed to attempt to fix it.

Those of us in this position obviously cannot use the Restore function from the Updater software ... Equally, I am not prepared to pay Apple 2/3rds the price of a new one to fix this (only to see the shoddy quality mess up again at some point in the future)... so what now ?

Does anyone think that replacing the hard-drive (dead easy to do yourself - many guides on the 'net available) would be worthwhile ? I think this might be a solution - format it directly from the command prompt in Windows using the FAT32 format and it should then be recognised as a USB HDD from within Windows. Whilst you're at it, those of you with 10 or 15 GB models could go out and buy a 40 or 80 Gb replacement drive.

Apple could not give a toss about this problem - check out their own forums to see the wall of silence on this issue (another reason to buy a different brand) so it's up to us to try and fix it.

Any thoughts and experiences / comments welcome.