I'm seeing the stage 5 with error 0x800703e4 as well but after reading 26 messages, I don't think I see even a workaround.
I'm running Win98SE and my syncs are dying nearly every time before completing (leaving songs in the unattached dir, but
no playlists). I just got the empeg, so the only versions of software I've ever tried are 9b and 9c. Is there some other version
I can go back to to avoid this problem?