cannot restore iphone 4 - help please

hi,

as with many people on here i think, i have reached a milestone frustration at apple and the way in which it is just not possible to tell whether something has hung and should be killed, or is just worked slowly. anyhoo... any help at all with this would be much appreciated. thanks for reading.

just got back from holiday and after a week have big iphone 4 problems....

itunes 10.3.1.55

ios 4.3.3

windows 7 home premium

uk O2 subscriber, not unlocked

since getting back from vacation windows 7 HP has been updated to SP1 with some auto updates which i didn't much notice but may be at the root of this problem (and, if they are, then i am mad as **** with microsoft, naturally).

after this, i found that my phone worked fine but it had lost access to all of its itunes content i.e. no music, no videos. my contacts, photos, apps all seemed to be ok.

in the iphone window in itunes, and also in the iphone settings app, it showed that all of my music / videos were still there, i just could not access it / play it / see it through ipod app.

so, i tried few options from the web, basic stuff, to try to help the iphone remember its loaded content. no luck.

so, i decided to hit restore. first time it got stuck on 'restoring iphone software", no more than 10% of the way through.

i had to unplug it.

i turned the iphone off, shut-down and restarted the PC and tried again. same thing. i am now on my third attempt at this, but nothing is making any difference. when i plug it in it does recognise it and goes through steps like "verifying restore with iphone update server", "extracting software", etc, so it does know it is connected. it just cannot get past this point.

any suggestions on how to fix this would be very much welcome.

thank you in advance for your time.

steve