Thanks for all your help. I followed down the line of your various advices (?) but nothing changed. But Tony, you hit the nail right on the button with the illegal characters suggestion.
I guess this comes from not knowing enough about Windows! It had just been bad luck that every track I had tried to upload was failing. I am uploading around 150Mb in the background whilst writing this so everything seems to be running properly. The biggest problem I have know is that I've just burnt 9Gb of mp3s onto CDs ready to transfer onto my empeg and loads of them are gonna have illegal characters - I just wasted another weekend!

If someone can point me to a list of illegal characters I would be very grateful.

All was looking great until I tried a few more syncs....

It took three attempts to create a new playlist at the root level, getting the same error each time. Each time I rebooted emplode but left the empeg in standby (it seems to have more problems if the empeg isn't in standby. Third attempt all worked fine.

Many thanks for your help on this one. Certainly half the problem is solved and is, as I suspected, entirely my own doing, but the rest is still elluding me.

Phil