well about the charging, mine takes about 30 min of USB charging to be able to turn on. The best way to do it is to plug it into an outlet. Mine also only has about 2 hours of battery life, not sure if thats normal or not..
About it not being recognized, you may need to upgrade its firmware at creative.com, i had to do this. Now computers are able to detect it, and is able to detect it as a removable disk without any drivers installed on the PC. (that is, if i set it to have some removable storage).
I also had to install the Media Explorer program off of the zen micro CD, then go to creative and download the newest version. For some reason the file on creative.com was not able to recognize the zen. Tris might be because its only a web update, although im not 100% sure.
Good luck. :wave: