I’ll go over everything I’ve done, just in case something is important that I don’t think is important. I connected the player to my computer and everything was fine. I erased all the pre-loaded music and extra folders. I loaded about 600 songs on the player in about a half hour. Disconnected and everything worked fine. Player played and I’m very happy. Now the next day, I want to reconnect to see which songs wouldn’t load to see if I had a different version of any of them (about 10 wouldn’t load). When I reconnected, the computer says I have a USB device that the computer doesn’t recognize. I go through a few messages, and it’s basically saying it can’t find the drivers for this device. I was never told to install drivers, and the manual doesn’t talk about drivers, so I assume they were installed automatically the first time I connected. Now what? Where do I go to get the drivers? Is this the firmware talked about here? When I connect, it shows the drive for a few seconds, then it disappears, then it’s back, then gone, it just keeps going back and forth.
bump
First make sure you’re not plugging the Clip into a USB hub. Some problems have been seen trying to use these hubs
Second try unplugging all other USB devices. Some problems have been seen due to conflicts with other devices.
Third if using a Windows XP or Vista machine you’ll want to go into the Device Manager (Control Panel… System… Hardware tab… Device Manager - in XP Pro) and look for a yellow triangle or exclamation mark somewhere. If it looks like it might be USB or Clip related then double click it to see the properties of the device in question and click on the Driver tab. Try to reinstall or update the driver and see what happens.
I’m not sure what you mean by a USB Hub, on my Device Manager all my unused USB ports say “USB Root Hub”, none say anything different. Plus, the first two times I used the port, I had no problems. Am I missing something? Should there be another type of USB port?
Also, I went into the Hardware tab and there were no triangles or exclamation marks, just a check mark on the drivers.
He meant “USB hub” as a physical external hub where you can plug multiple USB devices into. Like a power strip, multiple outlets. USB hubs use also an external source for power. If you have one, plug it in to feed steady power to your hub.
If you don’t use a hub, then you might have a bad cable and/or a bad registry in Windows. Vista is even worse when it comes to registry problems and USB devices acting up. One time Vista refused to delete a key while I was logged on as administrator… good luck with that one if you need to clean the registry and a bad entry.
I would use a different PC and plug it in. If the Clip behaves the same way, try a different cable. If still same problem, you have a bad Clip. Or if you’re lucky, you have a bad firmware on the Clip that you can update (see firmware update sticky for Clip) that might (keyword is “might”) fix your problem.
I am a network administrator and sometimes play a “PC technician” but not on TV. Process of elimination is what this is all about in this world. 
Thanks! Looks like it was a bad cable.
