When I try to sync podcasts to my Nano, iTunes freezes

Question

I recently acquired a new 6th Generation Nano. Whenever I try to sync podcasts to it, iTunes freezes up and has to be forcibly stopped from the Task Manager. This doesn't happen if I try to sync the podcasts to another device (I have an iPad and until recently had an earlier model of Nano and neither have any problems). It's fine if I set it to sync podcasts, but if I actually mark off any podcasts to be transferred and then sync, the Nano sort of freezes in that 'Connected' state we usually get and iTunes freezes up entirely at some point while the 'Starting Sync' message is displayed. I don't have any sort of issues opening up the Podcasts folder or anything like that, it's just when I try to send Podcast files specifically to the Nano that I have a problem.
iTunes version 10.6.0.40
Desktop PC, Win7 64-bit SP1

Answer 1

Problem solved. Rolling back to iTunes 10.5.3 fixed this and restored normal behavior to the sync process. This would seem to corroborate the idea that this issue is the result of some sort of problem with iTunes 10.6. Here are the steps I took to rollback to the previous version of iTunes:
Download the appropriate version from this page and install (but don't launch iTunes yet). The availability of this installer is time sensitive, of course.
Assuming you have already used iTunes 10.6, there is a file called iTunes Library.itl that iTunes creates and you will need to either delete it (if you don't care about losing your playlists) or replace it with the last version in the "Previous Libraries" folder (assuming you ran iTunes 10.5.3 before this). Just move the last version from the Previous Libraries folder (it will probably have a date in it's name), put it in the same place as the original file and rename it to be iTunes Library.itl. These files are located in /Users/username/Music/iTunes/ (for Mac OS), or \Users\username\My Music\iTunes\ (for Windows 7). More info here fo other Windows OS's.
Once the iTunes Library.itl file is dealt with you should be able to launch iTunes 10.5.3 successfully.
Worked for me.