30 second blank spots on shuffle

[adcowie]

I somehow managed to crash Windows while my shuffle was updating which corrupted one of the songs. Ever since then its been prone to read/write errors when I update it and the only way I can unfreeze my PC is to unplug the shuffle without doing all the "safely remove hardware" stuff you're supposed to do. All of which seems to have resulted in scattered occasional blank spots when it plays silence as if it's a tape that's been wiped.

I assume the silences are caused by the system crashes rather than hardware. The man in the Apple shop reloaded it from his Mac but when I updated it again on my PC it successfully writes a whole new batch of songs but with these silences.

Any idea how to make them go away?