IPod corruption/can't open iPod drive

Hi,

I've been having a few problems with my iPod, iTunes and my laptop in general. A couple of days ago my iPod (which was working fine beforehand) starting telling me that something had gone wrong and I needed to check Apple support. I assumed this was some kind of corruption and sure enough, when I plugged it in iTunes told me it was corrupted and needed to be restored to factory settings, which I did. This isn't my main problem, but it's kinda connected.

Now here's the annoying part: the library on my iPod is synced with an old computer that's since gone, meaning syncing it with iTunes would give me a new library. The trouble is, each time I plug in my (blank) working iPod it tells me again that it's corrupted and needs to be restored.

I put this down to some silly messing around in the iPod's files (viewed in My Computer etc.) when trying to previously get the library from my iPod into iTunes; some website told me that deleting a file in the iPod's files would allow me import stuff but it eventually didn't work, so I left it be. To compound all of this, when I now try and enter the iPod's files within My Computer it stops responding and basically refuses me access.


My questions:

-how can I access/view the iPod's files?
-is my iPod still "corrupted" even though iTunes apparently solved it?
-is there an important file now missing from the iPod?
-can I put said file back onto the iPod to allow me to put music onto it again?



Just for the record, I have an up-to-date version of iTunes (AFAIK I downloaded the latest version a few days ago), I'm running Windows Vista and it's an old, black and white early generation iPod - from memory it's a fourth generation classic.


Thanks a bunch. :)