Pls Advise Why my iPod Touch's Albums: Tiny black screens, not pictures

Question

Hello,
I've got a 16GB iPod Touch, 1st generation with 2.1 Software Update. I manage the music manually on a Windows XP desktop. I love this device and have been loving it since i got it as a Valentine's gift early this year.
I'd customized some of the album art images with jpgs found online, saved to hard drive. this was especially useful for those albums (homemade) that didn't have cover art associated with on iTunes/Gracenotes or wherever apple goes to find cover art.
The problem now is that in the Music Folder, when I browse Albums on the Vertical (not Cover Flow) view, some images are 1) misplaced i.e. Snoop Dogg's picture where Chaka Khan's should be or 2) images are replaced with a tiny black screen. (this isn't the negative black screen I've been reading about) There seems to be some error in how the Album View Vertical is working. When I flip through the images in Cover Flow (Horizontal) every thing is fine; even the tiny black screens of the Vertical mode show their true picture in horizontal Cover Flow. i'm wondering about the tiny black screen, since I usually get a musical note image if there is no art, not a black screen.
So here are my questions:
1) Why am I getting tiny black screens instead of album art images in the Albums preview screens?
2) Could this be related to some general sluggish responses to the screen at times?
3) I have two total pages of applications that work fine (if sluggish--the NYTimes is a big culprit in the sluggishness department-even blanking out the iPod, but even sweet Wurdle can act up), would this be related?
4) Is there a way to fix this tiny black screens issue without having to wipe the whole iPod clean (sniff! fingers crossed!)
Thanks!

Answer 1

I had the exact same issue and just spent a good chunk of time fixing things. I made note of each bad album - covers were OK in Cover Flow and when song was playing but vertical scroll and tiny thumbnail in the corner of the tracks window showed only a black thumbnail - then deleted these albums from my iPod. Then I went back and re-added these albums to my iPod but added them ONE AT A TIME by showing the artwork column in my library and dragging them over by the artwork and waiting for each album to finish and finish syncing before dragging the next one over. This seems to have brought back the tiny thumbnails and fixed the problem for now. I have no idea why it did this but I think there's an artwork bug in iTunes that needs to be fixed in the next update as many others have said that dragging over too many albums at once seems to cause issues with artwork showing up in general.
I know it sounds like a pain to drag over one album at a time and wait for it to finish but it seems to be the only way to do things for now. Hope this helps.