IPod Reports no songs or playlists, however iPod is full.

I have a 30gb 5G ipod that has never had any problems until I loaded it full of new songs (around 20,000 of them) which are small files for foreign language study. Subsequently, the iPod reports that there are no songs or playlists. However, the ipod is roughly 17 Gb full, and this is properly reported under the about menu.
I restored my ipod, (twice) but this didn't help - midway through the first try, I stopped the sync and checked and the songs showed up, and I plugged in and re-continued. When all the songs were updated, once again no files display.
The iPod reports no songs or playlists, when in fact there are thousands of tracks on the iPod. The pictures, oddly, show up. When I say it reports no playlists or songs, I mean that if I go to the about screen, it says 0 songs and 0 playlists, although it shows the correct amount of Gb used. All of the menus are blank, with no songs or playlists. The exception is the photo viewing function, which still works fine and displays all of the photos on the iPod as it should.
This same problem has been reported a number of times by other iPod users elsewhere, just one example:
http://forums.ilounge.com/archive/index.php/t-61231.html
I am using the most current version of iTunes on Windows XP. Everything looks and behaves normally on the itunes side of things.
My iPod is essentially unusable currently, as it is loaded with songs but won't recognize them. I would appreciate any help.

I tried to change the drive letter as suggested. However, after a restore and a sync, I end up with an iPod full of inaccessible files. sigh
By the way, to be exact, I have over 33,000 files now - could the shear number of files have something to do with it? Is there a limit of the number of files that can be put on the ipod? I also have over 300 playlists - could this be a problem?

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