I have spent the last few days very unproductively, trying to get 2 different iPod Shuffles to sync.  One was an old generation 1 Shuffle, and one was a new gen. 2 Shuffle that I just bought, thinking that the old one had died…well, the new Shuffle behaved exactly the same as the old one when connected to my old Windows XP computer.

For some reason, I could no longer add new songs to my iPods, or sync them. They showed up in iTunes, but I couldn’t do anything with them.  The little LED just stayed green, it never blinked orange indicating that data transfer was occurring, even though iTunes said that it was syncing.

What ended up sort of fixing the problem is the removal of the USB drivers for the iPod in the device manager. Then I reconnected the iPod, and ONLY allowed the Apple USB drivers to be installed.  I did not allow Windows to install the drivers for the new ‘disk drive’ that it wanted to install, or the ‘generic drive’ drivers that Windows also wanted to install.

So now, iTunes can see the iPod and sync it, but I can’t use it as a USB drive since it does not show in Windows explorer.

And for some reason, my iPod nano works just fine, just as before, on this computer….

UPDATE:

The fixes above were only temporary.  As soon as the shuffle was disconnected, and then reconnected, Windows XP acted like it had never seen the iPod before and asked to reinstall the drivers…I posted my final solution on the Apple iPod Shuffle forums here: iPod Shuffle gen 1 and gen 2 Windows XP driver problems.

Basically, the solution was to connect the iPod to a different computer that had iTunes installed, and then to ‘enable disk use’ on the settings page.  Then I was able to plug my iPod into the first computer and have the first computer recognize the iPod without any troubles.