Music is on the shuffle but doesn't show in iTunes

Question

Okay. I've never had this problem before; I've got a 160GB iPod video and an old pink mini, both of which work fine with my computer(s) and iTunes.
My problem is the shuffle. I got the 2GB one brand new, straight from Apple. I keep all of my music on an external drive. When I first hooked up the shuffle along with the external drive it had a major freak out and one would disconnect the other one every time I tried to use both at once. So I googled, read that sometimes you can't have other things plugged in at the same time as the shuffle. Ended up hooking both to a USB hub and they worked perfectly together.
Plugged the shuffle back in today and there was no music listed on the shuffle in iTunes, however, it said that I had used up however many megabytes, with 71 songs on the shuffle. (You know the little bar down at the bottom?) Ejected it, hit play, and the music is all there. Reconnected, added one song, and it wiped out everything on the shuffle. So I readded everything I had on there, ejected, made sure I didn't have any playback problems, reconnected, and now the same thing is happening again. The bar shows that I've used the space but doesn't list any of my music. I haven't tried to add any more songs because I don't want to go through readding all of that stuff again right now.
So, any thoughts? I disabled automatic syncing for all of my iPods, and I don't use the autofill option. I've only used one of my computers to add music so far, and haven't had any problems adding purchased content.
Any help would be greeeatly appreciated. And if anyone is in need of a visual for what I'm talking about, screen caps are here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v376/littlestarsfan/itunes1.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v376/littlestarsfan/itunes2.jpg

Answer 1

but the iPod shuffle doesn't show up in the drives section so I can't change it to begin with.
Per the article above, you don't start with changing the drive letter of your iPod. You start by changing the drive letter of your networked volume (usually, an external drive).
"Resolution
Solution
This issue is documented in Microsoft Knowledge Base document 297694, "New Drive or Mapped Network Drive Not Available in Windows Explorer".
Changing the drive letter of your network volume should resolve the issue. If you are unable to change the drive letter of the network volume because your programs depend on a specific drive letter, then you can use the following steps to change the drive letter of your iPod instead.
Important: Changing the iPod drive letter may not affect what letter the iPod uses on subsequent connections, so it is not the best long-term solution. If you are unable to change the drive letter of your mapped network drives, contact your system administrator."