HELP!!!! Blue screen of death, IPOD a p.o.s.....

Question

In advance - thank you to anyone who can help and/or explain things to me. I'm better than your average bear at tech stuff, but this is well beyond my knowledge area. It's a version of the same problem everyone seems to have:
1. Ipod worked successfully for 14 months. (2nd generation, no clickwheel)
2. Connected, ipod claims needs to be reformatted, crashed during.
3. Apple store reset ipod for a mac, still needed to reformat for windows at home.
4. Several crashes and various states later, am now repeatedly getting the following:
- Computer recognizes Ipod, itunes and updater won't.
- open updater to reset ipod, within minutes get blue screen of death.
- sometimes only connecting ipod will produce blue screen of death
- Error messages are as follows:
STOP 0x000000EA THREADSTUCK_IN_DEVICEDRIVER (Q293078)
- Event log is telling me the following:
"The Parallel port driver service failed to start due to the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it."
"The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, has a bad block."
"The device, , did not respond within the timeout period."
"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation."
- What I have tried: uninstalled and reinstalled ipod/itunes, reset computer to previous dates settings, disabled/enabled through device manager
So, short of heading off to steve job's house to yell at him, what should i do?????? The apple store people claim the actual ipod is fine. is the problem my computer? the cord? the ipod?
Specs: Gateway 200, Windows XP, running through a firewire port.

Answer 1

I will be going away for a long time in a few weeks, as we travel across country for the last move of our lives (and then it will be several weeks before I get internet service again, so I may be off this forum for a month or more). But with you, JB, Charlie and so many others (Otto is in his periodic helpful moods right now :>) I'm sure I won't be missed.
my sympathies ... asset disposal in NZ and moving to NC with a few suitcases was traumatic enough ... moving from one apartment to another in the same
b complex
after a year was not fun ...
now that Buegie's first aid kit is doing point-duty on some of the installer errors, i think i'm going to be able to spend some time over here again ... so some additional reserves will be available. (amazing how even when treating this as a full-time voluntary-work thing, it's still possible to get overwhelmed for a week or two ...)
love, b