On a whim, I tried jEmplode.... it had no trouble. Now I can sync music to my new drive and all seems to be working fine. YAY, I'm a happy camper again!

The two things that failed me were the "official" versions of the builder image and emplode. Having run jEmplode, I now get further with emplode (v2.10), which now fails on the 2nd to last step "Retrieving player configuration". And emplode (v2.0) tries to sync, but gets stuck on "Uploading playlists..." (I have 2 playlists, with 1 track each).

Oh well, as long as jEmplode works, it's not such a big deal.

Just need to reinstall all the 3rd party apps now, that oughta keep me busy for a while.