Glad to hear your 'Pod is, once again, submitting to your will. We were one step away from Corporal Punishment. Never pretty, that.
Just to wrap this up, and for anyone else who might be reading and applying the above steps, uninstalling the Root Hub in the Device Manager and rebooting causes Windows to basically kind of reset your USB device controllers. The several minutes of delay for the iPod to be recognized (I was aware of this delay and should have mentioned it) was due to Windows having to reset numerous USB controllers. Once it did THAT, it began searching for installed USB devices, found the poster's iPod and subsequently installed it.
Lag-time for this process will depend on the overall "strength" of your system. The faster your processor, the more system RAM, etc. your system has, the faster this process will go.
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