Is there a way to restore an iPod's play count? It mysteriously disappeared

Question

For some random reason, my iPod decided to erase the play count of all of the songs on my iPod...but it left other things, like Genre, Date Added, Last Played, Skip Count, etc. The Last Played column especially makes no sense because it'll say that I last played a particular song "12/4/2009 12:58PM" and have the play count as 0.
Is there any way to restore the play count? I'm particularly annoyed because I had a smart playlist that contained the top 30 most played songs on my iPod.
And I don't think my iTunes Library would be of any use; I've stopped using the iTunes Library to manage my music for quite some time now. I only use iTunes as a middle man for dragging and dropping my music onto my iPod (so obviously I don't use the syncing feature).

Answer 1

Tyler:
First, start Task Manager. Kill iTunes.exe, iPodService.exe, and iTunesHelper.exe. Just select them and End Process on each one.
Next, use these instructions to put the iPod into forced disk mode: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93651
Now, connect it to the computer. You should be able to recognize the iPod in this way.
If these instructions do not work, then something else is wrong, and whatever device locks up is where the problem is. Meaning that
-if the iPod won't go into Forced Disk Mode or comes out of Forced Disk mode, then the iPod has the problem and needs to be replaced (it's not fixable by you)
-if the computer locks up, then the computer probably needs to be formatted and have Windows reinstalled, since no Apple software is now running on the thing (you killed the only three pieces of Apple software that matter)
This is one of those things that is simply always true. There's no trickery involved, no way you can make it behave other than the way I've laid it out above. It's a simple matter of knowing how the stuff works.
So, I hope that helps you find the problem at least, if not to fix it. In forced disk mode, with no Apple software running, the iPod is just like any other external hard drive. Nothing special to it.