[todenwal]

First off, forgive me. This is going to be long. But it should be, I've been at it for 4 hours.

Woke up this morning, and was super happy about the firmware and software updates. I checked for an update in the software and it came up with no problems. I set it up, and it worked fine. I only had two problems that I could see. The first one was that it said it wouldn't play video (I don't remember exactly what it said) because my video card might need new drivers. I proceeded to download and install them. Great. The second problem I saw was the first time I ran the software from scratch (I still haven't hooked up my zune to the computer yet). It showed up as a white box, but there was nothing shown in it. All window behavior (minimize, maximize, close) worked fine, so I thought it was just being super slow. I let it go for a while (5 mins or so), and it showed a message that said, "You haven't made a selection. Is the software displaying properly?" with a yes and no button. I clicked the no button, and it said the software needed to restart. It did, and worked great. I then plugged in my zune and updated it's firmware. This also went off without a hitch and worked great. Following my usual protocol after installing software, I restarted the computer. After the restart, I opened the zune software again. I again ran into the white square. After waiting for 10-12 mins, I hadn't received that nice message that had fixed the problem previously. I never came. I uplugged my zune and put it across the room in case this was causing the problem (perhaps a redundant loop of updating). This didn't help, so I restarted my computer and the software multiple times, and still only got the white box. On exploration, everything in the software worked. I could click where stuff was supposed to be, and it would follow the action, I just couldn't see it. I referenced several zune and M$ documents, but couldn't find anything like I was seeing. I decided I'd just do a fresh reinstall. I went over to zune.net and downloaded the software, then went to the control panel and uninstalled the zune software. This was successful, but still gave me the blank white square problem. So I called on our good friend and unzooned the software. Upon reinstalling, the software (previously downloaded from zune.net) gave me an unknown error. So I pulled out my original zune cd (v1.1) and installed. This came up fine. Upon running the upgrade (from inside the zune software, not from the downloaded file), it asked me to find zune.msi. I searched my computer for it, but it was not to be found. I looked up a few places seeing if I could find a solution, and all I got was a hack to run the zune software on vista (I later tried this hack for my XPMCE2005 system, but it didn't help). So, I tried it again, the whole unzoone and reinstall from cd, then upgrade. This time, the upgrade told me that my software was the most current version (it clearly wasn't). At wits end, I turned to my last resort, and rolled back my whole system to a point a few days ago. This did bring back the software to it's previous version, though it's a little sketchy. I tried updating again (both from inside the software and by redownloading the software from zune.net), but to no avail. It seems to load fine until it gets to a certain point, and then it says it can't find zune.msi and asks me to direct it to it. Upon not finding it, it quits.

I'd rather not reinstall windows today (it's a pain) to get this running, but I don't know how else to solve this problem. Does anyone have any suggestions or thoughts that might give me some help? I'd appreciate all the help I can get.