Songs cut short on iPod

Hello,

For the last few months I've been living with a problem with my iPod. It picks random tracks and fails to transfer the entire song. So, I'll be listening to a song on my iPod and then it will cut off and go right to the next track. It's very frustrating! So, I've been troubleshooting the problem. Here's what I've found:

1. This happens with both aacs and mp3s, both downloaded from itunes or some other source or ripped from CDs.
2. The affected track on the iPod plays just fine in my iTunes library as long as I play it on the computer.
3. If I uncheck the affected track, synch the iPod, then check it again and synch it again, it fixes the problem for that track.
4. I have restored my iPod multiple times since the problem emerged to no avail.
5. Since unchecking, synching, checking, & synching seems to work, I attempted to do this on a wide scale (I did the whole library). It didn't work.
6. I tried removing iTunes completely. Since my play counts (and other metadata) are very important to me, I did not remove the library itself, just the program and as many associated files as I dared.
7. I've got iTunes 9.
8. I've restored the iPod after everything else. It still does it!

Is this a problem with iTunes, my iPod, or is my library corrupt?

Thanks!

Since it only happens on the iPod - I would have to say the iPod.

I don't know how the drives in the iPods work, but it sounds like bad areas on the drive to me. You sync a song and part of it gets written to a bad area of the drive, when you go to play the song, it plays up until it can't read the info and goes to the next song, When you delete it and sync it back, it gets written to a different area of the drive, so it works. Meanwhile, another song is written to the bad area and it misbehaves.

What to do about it - thinking I'd call Apple.