How many more tracks were out there, sneakily hiding amongst the ones and zeros, tracks that had been once loved by my Zune’s previous owner but which were now my sworn enemies?  The answer turned out to be quite a few, as I would discover over the next few weeks of frustrating playlist interruptions.  I also began to have problems with the Zune not being able to play songs that were legitimately mine, either giving me a “not found” or “rights expired” error when attempting to load them.  Eventually this snowballed until approximately one out of every four or five tracks was completely unplayable.

It was at this point that I completely outsmarted myself and caused myself a great deal of misery for no defensible reason.  I was planning a rather long road trip the week of my compounding Zune errors, and the night before I figured I would just format the Zune in order to erase all of the content and reload my tracks once more.  Unfortunately, there is no actual “format” command in the Zune software, merely the option to remove all files.  I did this, naively thinking that perhaps it would wipe clean the phantom tracks that had plagued me for over a month now.  To my horror, even though the PC interface software showed no files listed on my device at all, once I had unplugged it from its cradle there were close to one hundred unwelcome, undeleted songs still displayed in its song list.

I searched online vainly trying to find an answer to my problem.  The general consensus amongst what few Zune gurus there are out there was that I needed to do a “hard reset” on the device, which would put it into a safe mode and actually delete the firmware and everything on the hard drive.  I did this twice, each time downloading and re-installing the up-to-date Zune firmware and each time finding myself still unable to remove the songs in question.  What’s worse is that each time I performed the hard reset, the amount of free hard drive space on my Zune incrementally shrank at a rapidly increasing rate.  Suddenly 85 percent of my Zune was occupied by “reserved space” – even though the unit was completely devoid of any actual files that I had loaded on it.

The third time I tried my reset – I know, I know, ever the optimist – the device wouldn’t load anything on the screen other than a message telling me to “Contact Support.”  It wouldn’t even recognize that it was attached to my PC cradle.  I broke down and dutifully dialed the tech support division as I had been commanded, where it was determined that the device would have to be sent back once more – mere weeks after my previous service call – and replaced.

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