External drives (e.g. iPod, external memory device) not working

I am new to this forum and to posting tech questions online in general so hopefully I can describe what's going on accurately.

My computer has had no problems to speak of lately. I had not synced my iPod nano in some time, maybe a month or two, so I plugged it in yesterday to sync it. I received the following message: "iTunes has detected an iPod that appears to be corrupted. You may need to restore this iPod before it can be used with iTunes." I have since discovered the problem has nothing to do with the iPod itself. The iPod plays all the music and podcasts that are currently on it just fine. When I plug it into my girlfriend's computer, her iTunes recognizes it just fine as my iPod and I was able to pull videos off of it.

I am now pretty certain the problem is with my USB drives. I have an external memory drive that I use to back up documents - I had not used this in some time either. Out of curiosity I plugged it in, and it's not working either. When I plug it in and turn it on, nothing pops up, and when I try to do certain actions to check on it, like open My Computer, the system freezes and I end up having to manually shut down the computer and restart.

I have gone through several threads on various forums and tried almost everything but nothing has resolved this issue. Some threads suggested that plugging in certain devices can mess up your USB drives like this, and a few weeks ago I did plug my girlfriend's printer into one of my USBs - I did get it to work but things were a little screwy with it, so I'm wondering if somehow that did something. Other than that, I can't think of anything else that has changed since the last time everything worked. So far I have tried changing the drive letter on the iPod, I have tried cleaning up my USB drives by using drivecleanup.exe, I have uninstalled and reinstalled the drives through Device Manager, and I tried restoring my computer to a time when everything was working - none of this has fixed the problem and I'm now at a loss. Also FYI, it's not easy for me to reinstall my operating system (I have Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 3), because I purchased my computer from a custom dealer so I do not own my operating system CDs - they just load the OS onto the computer for you. I can take it in to have it reinstalled but it costs $160 and I just did that a few months ago so I really don't want to spend that much to do it again if it's not absolutely necessary, especially since everything else on the computer is working fine. I am hoping someone will have some insight on this and can help me out. Any advice is welcome, this has become extremely frustrating and time consuming.

Thanks,
Jon
 
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