unknown error [-50]

I've been getting this error quite often lately. I had thought this was an indicator that the disk in the iPod was failing (its a few years old now). However, I am now seeing this with my 4GB Nano which is <1 year old. This seems less likely to be a windows issue as the Nano uses USB and the 5G uses my firewire ports. So now I'm starting to believe that perhaps my iTunes database is somehow corrupt.

Another observation is that in the past I would have cases where my iPod would skip songs, often several at a time. The iTunes suggestion is that the computer disk file was corrupt and suggested ripping the song again. I found that the computer disk file was fine and that it was the data on the iPod that was corrupt. I verified this by simply removing the songs from the iPod list, syncing, re-adding the songs, and syncing again. Often this would resolve the problem.

So is there anyway to re-build or verify the iTunes DB? Any other suggestions as to what is wrong with my setup?

I originally chose an iPod over a Zen player because I could not get the Zen software to sync properly. The situation now is that I can only sync my iPod by doing a restore and downloading all songs again - this is really painful on a 20GB unit. Thanks.<br>
X86 Windows XP Pro