Well now it seems to connect only when it feels like it. I disconnected the empeg and then re-connected it and emplode found it. When it tried to do the first synch it froze and I had to kill it through device manager. Once I did that and re-started emplode it couldn't find the player again. So, once again I disconnected and re-connected the empeg and whattaya know, emplode finds it again. Now the synch seems to be working but I can't be sure that this won't happen again. Just to add more information to my post, here is the driver that is currently being used:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\empegcar.sys

...oh great, now emplode has frozen on "Rebuilding music database" after synching up all my new tunes. Bummer