I have a first gen Ipod that has been working fine with ITunes on Windows 8.1. Today I tried to put a new Christmas playlist on it for my wife.

The playlist appeared to copy all the songs fine, and indeed they are there if I navigate to the Ipod through the file system. However, no music shows up, no playlists, nothing on the Ipod menu. And, now every time I connect the Ipod to my PC, ITunes starts up, then immediately shuts down.

I have tried reinstalling ITunes, and no luck. I've googled the problem, and found it's a fairly common problem, but I couldn't find any solutions. I also found this happens with both Macs and PCs, so Apple purists the PC isn't the problem.

The problem may be the Ipod itself, but I don't get that impression since I can actually navigate to it and access files in Windows Explorer. ITunes really sucks and always has, so I suspect something just went wrong on the sync.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? I can blow away everything on the Ipod and start fresh, if that's easiest. I'm not sure how to do that at the moment though.

TIA