A friend of mine gave me an iPod Shuffle. It had never even been taken out of the box, so it's a brand new toy. I already have iTunes on my computer because I used to own a regular iPod until it died. I loaded the iPod software which came with the shuffle and it seemed to install just fine, but I can't get my iTunes to recognize the new Shuffle. I clicked on the iPod updater feature which appears when you d/l the software and I get a message stating, "Invalid iPod service version". I updated my iTunes to the latest version and that hasn't helped either.

Any suggestions? I'm scanning iPod Lounge and iPod support, but thought I'd ask here in the meantime.

you should uninstall itunes and all of your ipod software (through add/remove programs) then download it again.

Stupid question... by uninstalling iTunes and the iPod software, I'm not going to lose my music, right? I'm 99.9% sure that I'm correct, but I need to make sure before I go uninstalling stuff.

I had to do this as well. I have a shuffle. No, you just have to load all your music back onto itunes, which may take a while.

How do I do that? Just click "open with iTunes" on the music files? Or is there a feature that allows me to do it all at once?

This is a project for after today's BBQ. I've been sitting here for three hours trying to figure this bullshit out.

Under the:

Edit>Preferences>iPod tab

did it list anything when it was connected?
I recall it being listed in there, but not showing up as a drive that I could copy stuff to in iTunes.
I had the same problem hooking up my cousin's Nano, and I just had to change a setting in iTunes to find the new device. It might have been something to do with authorizing that iPod on the current iTunes.