WinXP Recognizes my Ipod, Tells me to Update, Updater always crashes!

Question

I have an Ipod Mini 4Gb and it's just recently gone crazy on me. Windows sees that my Ipod is connected and then tells me that it needs to be updated. The Updater opens up and says Initializing, but it always crashes. I've done all the following to see if it would help me:
Reset my Ipod pressing the menu and select button
Re-Installed Itunes and the Updater.
Restarted my Computer on many occasions....
The Ipod itself when it's disconnected from the computer seems to be going very slowly when i try and go through the menus. Since i reset it, it has none of my songs on it at all and since i can't update it, Itunes doesn't even see the stupid thing. Anybody seen this before? I'm almost thinking i gotta send this thing in to Apple... and it figures this would happen when my warranty finished up....

Answer 1

For the people having problems with their IPOD not being detected here is a solution I used to solve it.
1. Plug in your IPOD
2. Left Click my computer and press manage
3. you will see an option called Disk Management, click it.
4. Most likely you will see a IPOD mounted there, change its Drive path to something that isn't used (anything but C).
5. Unplug your ipod, and plug it back in
6. Try the updater again.
My friend helped me out in doing this since my harddrive path was not named as C:. Instead the IPOD mount path was C:. Good luck, hope this helps some or all of you!