I'm having a heck of a time with this. I got an ipod for christmas, and so far I've spent probably eight? ten? hours trying to get it to connect to my computer. I downloaded itunes and connected it. Immediately I got error messages saying that windows didn't recognize the device and then that "one of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned". Then my safely remove hardware icon went nuts. It was rapidly going on/off on/off on/off and chiming then it would stop for maybe 30 secs and then continue rapid cycling. During the cycling I'm unable to stop it. So itunes would only recognize it when the safely remove hardware had stopped for a minute. itunes would tell me that it needed to be restored. If safely remove hardware held out long enough then itunes would restore and always it would end with "The ipod could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (1418)". Reconnecting, itunes would not recognize it and and I'd go back to safely remove hardware cycling. I've tried all the tricks I could find - the 5 r's, forcing it to disk mode, etc. I tried the ipod on a friends computer and it works fine there. Then back to my computer and same problems. This is soooo frustrating. Also now that this has happened my USB ports are not working properly. Windows gives me the same error messages for a thumb drive that previously worked fine. Also a message comes up saying that i should connect to a higher speed USB 2 port and it shows available ports. Trying each USB slot on my computer shows the same thing, yet I'm positive my computer has four enhanced USB 2 slots. Any suggestions would be most, most, gratefully accepted.

try removing all usb slots in device manager, reboot, and let windows reinstall them. then plug in the ipod

OK, I just tried that and same problem. Thanks for the suggestion though. Do you know of anything else I could try?