I didn't see any other posts with this info, so here's my story:

I have a windows laptop using iTunes and I've enabled disk use on the iPod. I had about 10GB of music as well as about 6GB of digital pics (backup to my laptop) on my iPod.
Last week the hard drive in my laptop crashed, so I was left with all my music and pics on my iPod and not sure how to get them back! Getting the pics back was cake, just plugged it up and coped them over, but the music? I read everything that I could find and purchased PodUtil, but it didn't work, it only saw about a third of the songs on my ipod (new 40GB clickwheel) I tried PodUtil support but never got a response, and then remembered the option in iTunes to have Itunes manage your music folder...

Here's what I did:
From windows explorer I enabled the option to show hidden files and found all my iPod's music under E:\iPod_Control\Music. I just copied all the F00-F49 folders to my iPod music folder, and iTunes organized them by artist and album FLAWLESSLY!!!! That's the easy part, now the pain the ###:
Once you have the music and whatever files you want off the iPod, you have to use the iPod Updater software to 'restore it' to factory mode and start again, coping all your music back to the iPod.

All things considered, it worked great, and you don't have to mess with any third party software that may or may not work for you.

Has anyone else used this method? Did you encounter any issues??

Thanks for reading, hopefully this helps another poor soul get their music back without having to deal with crappy third party software.