Randomly forced to restore my iPod to factory settings

I'm just about ready to give up on iTunes or iPod - whichever is responsible for my problems.
Two weeks ago I bought a 60GB Video iPod. After just a few days I had to take it back, as iTunes would randomly stop being able to read its contents. Of course, the only way to rectify the problem was to restore it to factory settings, meaning that I had to spend hours transferring my music back each time. It seemed to happen about every 4-5 times I connected the iPod to add more music.
Apple's tech support agreed that this was a hardware issue, and that my computer met the requirements, so I took it back to be replaced. I've owned my new one for about a week, and I've run into the same problem. I've just been forced to restore it so I have a blank iPod again.
I simply cannot work this way, as I use my iPod for teaching and need to be able to add files without having to start from scratch. I can't understand why this is happening, as I have reinstalled iTunes and the iPod updater to ensure I have the latest versions.
Please help, I'm going insane.
5G 60GB Video   Windows XP  

Just as a follow-up to this...
I spent an hour on the phone with Apple's tech support yesterday. The person I spoke to was very helpful, and suggested that the cause of the problem might be that my computer's hard drives used the NTFS file system, while my iPod was FAT32. He helped me to reformat my iPod to NTFS and then restore it once more. He was convinced this would solve my problems.
While I agree that his suggestion was logical and may prevent future issues, plugging my iPod in today caused the same error message. Simply plugging it in has deleted much of my music (or at least rendered it inaccessable from my iPod's menu - I suspect it's still there as not enough time passed for it to delete that much music) and I can't add more until I restore it again.
Surely somebody's experienced this before? Bear in mind that this is the second iPod in less than 3 weeks to present these symptoms.

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