Ooooh.. Roger would know.

Normally, player settings are not committed to flash until power off or reboot. When doing a Sync, the player s/w gets restarted without a reboot, so perhaps it is reading the old settings from flash.

If this were the case, things like volume, balance, etc.. would also suffer. Try it: change volume really up or down, and then sync. Does it revert?

-ml