Software 1.2.1-Blank "Smart" Playlists?

Thought to try a new thread as there seems to be a lot of -48 issues (which I do not have). For MANY years I have used about 250 "smart" playlists by artist and play count. Every time I sync, any songs by that artist that have been played come off the playlist, until I have gone once through every song. The list is blank and it does NOT get transferred to my Pod. I do the 1.2.1 update and guess what? I now have over 250 playlists listed on my Pod with about 200-210 of them containing... NO SONGS.
Has Apple become SO lame that this is intentional? Am I the ONLY one experiencing this? BTW, I'm, no noob to any of this, so I have gone though a bunch of testing to try and see what's up. Including re-downloading the updater. Full restore. None are helping and I have a Pod that I simply can not use in the way I have always been able to use.
Anyway, my question is if you have a smart playlist that, by it settings, has no songs listed, that show NO songs when selected in iTunes that will actually appear as a blank playlist on a 5.5G Pod?

I thought i'd start a new thread as the old one is
taking way to long to load.
Good plan; the only thing worse than the load time for the old thread was that Apple haven't fixed, or even acknowledged, this problem.
I have found 1.2.1 to be a little better than 1.2 so far. I only get problems when I eject my iPod and reconnect. What I have found works is this (and I think it is effectively Robert Todd2's original solution):
1. Configure iTunes to enable Disk Use on the iPod and to NOT start iTunes when you connect the iPod.
2. Shut down iTunes and eject the iPod
3. Reconnect the iPod, run Disk Utility / Repair Disk. This finds lots of errors.
4. Start iTunes and everything runs just fine. I can change settings, add contents, delete content, click Apply etc.
5. When done, eject the iPod, remove the cable and close iTunes
6. Reconnect the iPod, run Disk Utility / Repair Disk. Again, will find lots of errors.
7. Eject iPod
8. iPod should now work fine.
9. When you want to resync, start again from 3 (you may not find any errors though as you ran a Repair Disk is step 6).
There have been loads of suggested fixes, most of them don't work, and those that do seem to work for a subset, so I offer this solution with no guarantee of success!!

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You can only automatically sync playlists using Windows Media Player 0 as far as I know. There's lots of other software out there that can use the Media Transfer Protocol of the Vision:M, but I'm not sure what they can do.
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Hmm, works fine for me, though I've learnt not to expect iTunes to be completely consistent between Mac and Windows.
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Thanks for the reply all and I will update you as to how I go with Genre podcast. I can confirm i was listening to the podcasts all the way through - as I understood that partly played podcasts werent marked as played. Thus from my point of view doing everything right so will see if the genre podcast works. All I would say if apple are reading this newsgroup is that from a user perspective this function isnt working well and I think a remove podcast after it has been listened to is a core function and shouldnt be a difficult thing to add on via a smart play list.
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See this post.
tt2

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Just nudging this one back to the top in case anyone has some input.

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Software 1.2.1-Blank "Smart" Playlists?

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