ALL music files lost on 4G/20 gig iPod today - help?

Had the iPod since February of this year. No problems. Recently updated to the latest version of iTunes. Everything's updated. Today, went to turn it on and every single file was gone. The menu settings were completely reset. Plug it into the pc and iTunes says there are no music files.
There were 14 gigs of music on it. And it's just...gone.
Help? Is there anyway the files are still there? What caused the complete loss of data? If I start the teidious process of putting it all back will this happen again?
Using WinXP with 4th Gen/20gig (non color) iPod.
Thanks in advance.

So it's connected to the new update? Jeez. Because it just happened out of the blue yesterday and the iTunes/iPod update was done back when it came out. (Thank goodness I didn't get around to updating the other one yet. I'll definitely be holding off now.)
For the moment, we (my boyfriend and I; it's his iPod that had the loss) had to restore to factory settings. After the data loss, it wouldn't update. Thing is, I think he re-installed the new version again and then began putting songs back in it.
I know last night it had accepted songs and played without problem, but...if it's a software issue and given it already failed once without warning, I'm of course worried it'll happen again.
I'll try to read through the topics back in September. Doing a websearch for this really didn't net me a lot. Which is why I thought it might be a fluke thing rather then a software thing.
I'm just trying to keep from having to go through this again. Poor guy, he had 18 gigs of music on there. A lot of it rare and odd things that he didn't have back-ups of, you know? He loves his iPod and this is just crushing. I'd like to learn the whys and the how to's of preventing it moving forward.

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