My ipod hates my laptop

Question

I purchased my ipod Classic in December, and my laptop is a Compaq Presario (over a year old).
I spent hours with helpdesk trying to the Classic to show up in device manager (thus, itunes). We tried everything, finally I gave up and decided to use my old desktop (HP that runs on Windows XP). My ipod classic works fine with the old desktop.
Oddly enough, last week my laptop needed a new keyboard, and holy cow! My ipod worked with my laptop... I assumed it was a USB issue that was corrected my the new keyboard.
After two days, my ipod would no longer work with my laptop. Same issue as before, I plug in the device, it reads 'connecting,' then just as fast it then reads, 'ok to disconnet.' {side note, my nano works fine with laptop}
I have done everything (re-installing/updating itunes, windows 7, and driver updates).
Before I break my laptop and/or Ipod Classic - anyone have any ideas and/or suggestions?

Answer 1

I've gone thru all the steps described in the link listed, multiple times actually, to no avail.
A couple of other things that are happening is that when I sync even a partial amount of my library to the iPod after disconnecting the music is not on the iPod. Also most of the time when the sync is finished a popup window will come up saying that there is not enough space left on the iPod to sync to. (I know for a fact that the music on my laptop hard drive barely fills up half of the 148GB avail. on the iPod.)