It seems that the quicker I do whatever it is I want to do before starting the sync, the less likely that it will hang.

I'm having another problem -- it's happened more than once today. The empeg is fine, in and out of the car and the dock several times. Fire up jEmplode, do a "refs=0" search, cut a song from the results list. Paste it into the proper playlist in "All Music | $album" Start the sync, everything goes fine, empeg reboots. I close jEmplode. The song is in the proper place on the player. Restart jEmplode, and while it connects to the player, it rebuilds the database, this time on the player but showing a progress bar in jEmplode. After it's done, jEmplode displas an error: "Inconsistency in playlist length. nFids = 15 but pairNum = 4"