iPod Shuffle Weirdness

For the last 2 weeks I've had very slow transfer speeds to and from my iPod Shuffle. Much slower than the already slowish USB 1.1 speeds that I was getting before. It started when I put the Shuffle into disk mode (allocating the full 1GB of space to use as a USB disk drive) and transferred a bunch of files to a friend's computer.

After finishing that I turned off 'disk mode' in iTunes and re-synched it to my music library. But now the transfer speeds were ridiculously slow, on the order of one song every 2 or 3 minutes, and it would randomly quit with an unknown error after about 100MB or so.

The weird bit is that even though I turned off 'disk mode' I could still see a small text file that I put on there when looking at the iPod's disk drive in My Computer. So somehow I think it was confused about how much of the disk was supposedc to be reserved for storage space, ec., and perhaps that's what was giving it problems.

Anyway, I just formatted the thing as a FAT32 drive in Windows, unplugged it and plugged it back in again, and iTunes thought it was a brand new iPod and did its thing to initialize it and is now filling it back up at the normal speed.

I don't know what exactly went wrong but formatting it did the trick.