Dreaded "An unknown error occurred (-124)" problem

Question

I've seen various posts on this and related topic, and have tried a few of the suggested solutions without success, so thought I'd post my version to see if anyone can suggest a way to fix this.
I have a 30GB video iPod that is about 2 years old. Up until recently, it was working fine. About a week ago I tried to sync it up with iTunes as I had some new music and it all went pear shaped.
Basically, it takes a few minutes to recognise that my iPod is connected, during which time I hear a few random "clicks" from the iPod (sounds very much like the noise the click wheel makes). On attempting to sync, it will get a few songs (usually somewhere between 5-20) before bombing out with the following error message:
"The iPod "[ipod name]" cannot be synced. The required folder cannot be found"
I hit OK to this, and then shortly after I get the following message:
"Attempting to copy to the disc "[ipod name]" failed. An unknown error occurred (-124)"
At this point, the iPod resets itself (as if I had done a manual reset) and then will eventually come back to the main menu. iTunes then attempts to sync again, with a similar result. I've only ever let this happen about 3 times before disconnecting and trying various things (resetting iPod, turning PC off and on, using different USB port, charging iPod from my wall charger for an hour, etc, etc)
I can run the iPod in diagnostic mode without any problems. I have also reformatted my iPod, as well as downloaded V1.3 of iPod software and am running V7.5.0.20 of iTunes.
Some of the other posts on here seem to indicate this problem only occurs when syncing videos or photos, but I have neither - I'm just trying to sync my music.
To make it even more frustrating is that after doing all the things I can think of, at some seemingly random point my iPod will decide its had enough of ******* me off and will happily sync without incident. But this normally takes an hour of fruitless effort and increasing levels of frustration!! Oh, and yes - I have tried to be a bit systematic with my "try this, then try that" to see if I can stumble across the right sequence of events, but there doesn't appear to be anything that works consistently!!
Is it just me, or is Apple becoming more and more like Microsoft when it comes to product reliability???

Answer 1

As an update to this, I have just installed the latest version of iTunes (7.7), so I'm running all the latest iPod and iTunes versions...
...but I'm still having the same problem
Can anyone provide any insight into how to fix this???