Ipod Nano not identified after HD replacement

Over the weekend my hard drive crashed on my Dell Inspiron 560. I had all of my songs, a mix of itunes and Amazon purchases, backed up to a USB flash drive, so no worries there. I successfully loaded a new hard drive and re-installed Windows 7, along with the drivers and utilities. Next I downloaded iTunes and re-loaded all of my songs and re-created playlists. The problem arose when I finally decided to sync my iPod with my "new" library.

I receive a pop up telling me that it has been detected but not identified. I've reset both computer and Nano and tried again without luck. I've uninstalled and re-installed all Apple software again...but no luck.

I've found a few solutions pointing to various methods, but still no luck. I located the Apple Device USB Driver by right clicking on "Computer" from the control panel, selecting "Device Manager", and then scrolling down to USB section. Since it had a yellow exclamation mark I uninstalled it since it as I read in several articles/posts. When I scanned hardware for updates though, it doesn't seem to re-install it. After that if I go back and see yellow exclamation in the same section for "USB Mass Storage Device", but no mention of anything Apple.

I don't know what else to do here and am hoping to avoid re-installing the OS and drivers again unless anyone thinks that's the only way to go at this point. I did find some tip for taking a screen shot by using Home + "Wake/Sleep" and then finding the section identifying it as a phone, but I must not be doing something right because I couldn't even find the "Wake/Sleep" button

Very frustrated.