I have a 30Gb iPod that, starting in early December of last year, started giving me the dreaded "exclamation folder" icon after a reboot. At first, it was intermittent, and would loop a couple of times, but eventually start up just fine.

However, as time went on, it took longer and longer to start, until it got to the point where it simply would not recover from the "exclamation folder" error.

So, I ran the iPod Updater and did a full restore, which got it working again. But it didn't last. After a few days, I started getting the "exclamation folder" behavior again.

At this point, it was obvious to me that it was a hardware problem, so I went to Apple's support website and filled out a repair request, describing the problem and my attempts at fixing it (as descibed above).

Well, to make a long story short, nearly 1 month later and countless hours on hold and lobbying tech support personel, I have now sent the same iPod in for service 3 times. The first 2 times they sent it back to me untouched! They claimed that there was nothing wrong with it. But each time I got it back, I would get the "exclamation folder" error within minutes of unboxing it. Finally, on the 3rd attempt, it looks like they're going to replace it (but only, I'm told, because they have a policy that iPods that come back for service 3 times get replaced no matter what).

It seems to me that if they had handled this better they could have saved:

1) Aggravation and ill-will on my part.
2) 3x the shipping and labor costs on theirs.

Anyone else have a similar experience?