ITunes slow, "Do not disconnect" and freezing - how I fixed it

Question

Ok, I don't know how many people this might help but I thought I would post how I managed to fix my iTunes.
I was experiencing various problems. Firstly, when starting up iTunes it would just give hourglass, stop, then boot up the program 1 minute later. Any action I did would cause the program to freeze for a while before it started the action I asked it to. The iPod would also never eject and would stick on "Do Not Disconnect". Any CD's I inserted would cause it to freeze. Sometimes iTunes wouldn't recognize that the iPod was inserted. It also consumed 100% of my CPU resources ALL the time, and would occasionally force me to reboot. Rebooting with iPod inserted would cause my PC to stick at the Mobo manufacturer screen and wouldn't boot at all until iPod was removed...
The list of things that made it not work is endless...
This fix is pretty simple, although it might not work for all. There seems to be a problem with the path letter assigned to the iPod when it is connected. If, like me you run your system boot on a path other than "C" and have no other drives attached to "C" then when you insert the iPod it will default the HD it creates to "C" - iTunes does not like this - your PC does not like this - Windows doesn't like it either! So, you could change it's path to something else but then every time you connect your iPod it will keep defaulting to "C".
So, you need to create a HD of sorts and assign it to "C" so that the iPod can never obtain that path when it's connected each time. Either create a small partition of an existing HD or install something like Daemon Tools and assign it's virtual drive to take up the "C" path.
As soon as I did this everything runs perfectly. No freezing whatsoever, iTunes works perfectly, no freezing ever, ejecting and inserting my iPod and CD's works fine. In fact, it all works fine!
I hope this might help at least a few people who are suffering with not being able to run their iPod Nano.

Answer 1

First of all, try another port on your computer. Some ports are not connected direct to the motherboard and do not recognize the iPod as well as those that are.
Still no joy? See these.
iPod doesn't appear in iTunes or on the Mac desktop.
iPod does not appear in iPod Updater or iTunes in Mac OS X.
iPod appears on the Mac OS X desktop but not in iTunes.
Try it in disk mode.
Putting iPod into disk mode.