Just thought I would post my experience, I installed last night. First I plugged the ipod into the firewire port. It was immediately recognized by XP. The removable drive was there as well. Then I installed EphPod and launched it. I thought this was going to be smooth at this point. I then went through the wizard and when it asked for the drive the ipod was on, I dropped down the box and selected my ipod drive. Then EphPod told me the the file or directory structure on the ipod was not proper and there was a button to create this structure. I went to explorer and surfed the ipod and the folder EpPod was looking for was certainly there. I thought this was odd from all the reading I have done. I clicked the button to create the hidden music folder and it failed. I got out of the wizard and tried to load some music and it would fail referencing the hidden ipod directory that it said was not there, but was. After trying a few more times, reinstalling Ephod and rebooting, I decided that I would have to bite the bullet and load the CD with MMJB. This also installed an Ipod application as well that could be used to update and resore the ipod. From the advice of other who said "Don't even open the Apple CD, Ephdod is all you need", I was confused. I could see not installing MMJB, but the ipdod utulity is a must I think. Anyhow, I freakin still hate MMJB's interface and after a few minutes, I got some tunes loaded. At the same time, I noticed some songs on the ipod that failed to transfer with EphPod. These appeared to be data files named correctly, but they would not play and would actually freeze the ipod. I was happier because I got some tunes on the thing, but felt a format/restore was in order, so I did it. I then closed MMJB and opened ephpod and I could transfer no problem. So I blew away the piece of trash MMJB and EphPod is working. I hope this thread helps someone with similar issues. I have some tagging issues with ephpod that I will post in a separate thread.
The long and short - I can't wait for MJ's pluggin.
Thanks for all the adice and help.
Joe