Lets come at this from another angle, perhaps you could give an example of what you functionally are trying to do and I will see what I can suggest given what we have to work with.
What I am functionally trying to do is use a smartlist to automatically pick some new tunes to put on my Ipod. I don't have such a big collection that this will be a total replace each time I sync, just mixes it up a bit.
From this list of tunes on the Ipod I have a group of general smartlists that I want to look at the 'new' batch of tunes on the Ipod. Most of them are based on star ratings, recently imported, mellow, uptempo, and some lists based on artists that others in the family like. These are all general enough that they can just go against what is being sent to the Ipod and pick up whatever matches the criteria. Sometimes they might be long, other times they might be short, doesn't really matter.
I can try the smartlists with size limits that equal the total, but that's not really what I want. Although, if I weight them accordingly as you suggest I may never know the difference.
Right now the Ipod is freaking out anyway, gets really hot, battery says it's charged than it looks dead right after I start using it, also last night MC said it had about 3000 songs on it and this morning the ipod said it only had 3 songs.
I need to figure out what's going, probably reinitialize it and then try the weigeted smartlists before I bug you anymore.
Thanks for all the help.
Have I mentioned that J River rocks?