ITunes library on external drive erased after syncing.....

Here's the scoop....Been running itunes 7.0.2 on Windows XP w/ no problems at all. I ran out of space on my internal drive so I added a WD My Book usb external drive last night. I want to use it for my main drive for the library, so I changed my library directory and then consolidated it all to the external drive, according to the directions here. Everything seemingly went ok.
Everything works just fine, until I sync up my ipod. It does the typical "slow way down, and maybe occasionally lock up" that I've read about so much here. Sometimes it will "finish" syncing after about 2-3 hours. That's not the big problem though. The main issue is that the library in the ext drive disappears as soon as I plug in my ipod. After syncing, my ipod is still unchanged, no songs added or deleted, and the ext drive is empty. The songs appear to be in my itunes library, but if I try to play any of them w/ the itunes player, it says they can't be found. And when I search the ext drive w/ windows explorer, it shows up empty. I have to run system restore to get them back. After that, everything is back to normal until I plug my ipod in again, then the whole vicious cycle starts over.
So far I have tried 4 of the 5r's. I'm afraid to do a restore on the ipod quite yet, cause I don't wanna risk losing it all. I've searched the forums a bit, but can't really find anything addressing this issue. Not really sure where to go from here, so any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!!
Emachines Pile-O-***** w/ Celeron D Windows XP
Emachines Pile-O-*****   Windows XP  

It sounds like your itunes is getting confused in the drive letter of the ipod since the new external hard drive was added you might want to change the drive letter of the ipod.....
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93499

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