ok, im doubting this, but is manually removing the playlist from the db used even an option? im not at all familiar with how the or where the db is stored.

There are sort of two databases. There are a bunch of files representing the playlists stored along with the mp3s on the player under /empeg/fids0 and /empeg/fids1 these files are ultimately flattened into a binary database (the building database step when you sync). If you could figure out which fid file represented the playlist that is causing you problems you should be able to delete it by hand and then rebuild the binary database. The problem is the fids filenames are just numbers so you would have to figure out which numbered file you need to delete and I can't think of a good way to do that if emplode and jemplode are both crashing on you.

-Mike