Force the mp3 connection with the Hold button, etc. If the Fuze was set to Auto Detect, and it detects Windows Media Player on your computer, it will connect in MTP mode as a virtual device. Your computer can only see MTP or MSC, not both. This may be part of the problem until you get the Fuze going and make it only use MSC (Settings/System Settings/USB Mode).
You could try reloading the firmware. There’s a firmware update thread with links to the final Fuze firmware.
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Sansa-Fuze/Sansa-Fuze-Firmware-Update-01-02-31-amp-02-03-33/td-p/139175
Don’t use the updater. Download the firmware itself from the All Regions links. There are two versions–the Fuze was made as two different pieces of hardware. If you can look around at the Fuze while connected, look for version.sdk (or possibly version.txt). Open it with Notepad and you can see if your firmware starts with 1 or 2.
If you don’t know which yours is, just download both of them and try them
Unzip the downloaded firmware. You’ll see FuzeA.bin for version 1 and FuzeP.bin (I think, not sure) for Version 2.
Make the connection. Drag the .bin file onto the driveletter. Disconnect and it should update firmware. If you haven’t been able to find out which firmware version is correct, and it won’t update, try the other version.
Has the album worked before on the Fuze? There could be some garbage in the tags, and the Fuze firmware is finicky about tags. Giant graphics or huge comments can slow down Refresh.
You can look at the tags, and fix them, with mp3tag,
Under Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg set its Write default to ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1.
Highlight tags to look at them. Look at Comments–you can <blank> them.
If the album graphic pops up when you highlight a tag, it’s embedded.
Under View/Extended tags you can extract the graphics. The floppy disc icon (on the right) will make a copy of the graphic called folder.XXX (.jpg, .bmp., .png). The X under the floppy will extract the images from the tags.
I run every album through mp3tag before putting it on the Fuze. Just highlighting all and Save will make the tags the correct version. I extract the art if someone jammed it in there. Under Tools, there’s also Auto-Numbering Wizard with Leading Zeros, which is also helpful.
