Eureka! iPod mini + Mac OS 9 = Virtual PC!

Several months ago my girlfriend bought me an iPod mini as a birthday present. Great gift, except that I am still stuck back in the stone age with as old OS 9 box (beige G3), so compatibility was an issue, as the minis do not support OS 9 or USB 1.1 in any way, shape, or form, purportedly. For a while I was just using her Windows machine to sync my iPod, but I wan't happy with this solution.
I posted a question to this forum about the possibility of running the iPod through Virtual PC with Windows 2000, since that OS is supported. I got a couple of responses that suggested that it wouldn't work, but none of them provided a compelling reason.
Well, to all the naysayers: it works! I finally got up the nerve (and freed up the HD space) to install VPC 5 with Windows 2000 on my old G3. Then, with VPC in the foreground I took a deep breath and plugged in the iPod... and voila! It mounted as a drive in Windows, and I was able to transfer files to it using Anapod Explorer. And it charged the iPod, even though I was using USB 1.1 and received an insufficient power message when I plugged it in with the Mac OS. I was also able to access my iTunes library by setting VPC to mount my Mac volumes as shared volumes for the Windows environment, so I didn't even have to transfer my music to the VPC disk image.
An imperfect solution, to be sure. VPC is still slow as dirt on an old G3, and I experienced several crashes through this process, but I finally achieved a degree of stability that was good enough until I can get a new MacBook. I wasn't able to install iTunes because the version of Win2K I was using needed a massive service update that seemed doomed to failure because of the crashes, but I have no reason to believe that it wouldn't work.
So to anyone else who finds themselves in this situation, I won't make any promises, but this seems to do the trick for me.
Beige G3 Desktop   Mac OS 9.2.x  

You can't use an iPod mini with Mac OS 9. First and second generation full-size iPods will work with Mac OS 9's iTunes, as will third generation full-size iPods which are running version 2.0x of the firmware.
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