I love my Zune and think it’s a great device. I’ve had a few different models over the years and never had any problems with them–each model just got better. Recently though that changed and my Zune could no longer get through a full sync. Here are the details and what proved to be my solution to the problem in case it helps anyone else.

The Zune I had this problem with was the 80GB model and it had been working for a long time without any problems whatsoever. I updated the software (the latest one–4.2.202.0–from just a couple of weeks ago) when it prompted me to do so. Next time I docked the Zune though I was prompted to update it as well. I went ahead and did that and then somewhere along the way I found I no longer had any of my music sync’d on it anymore. I figured it was a firmware update or something that required formatting it so I just proceeded to sync everything again.

This is when I started running into the “Zune Player isn’t responding” error (C00D124D). In the end, after trying lots of things,  what seemed to be causing the problem for me was having my Zune plugged into a USB hub. I actually tried two different hubs and both reproduced the problem. When I bypassed the USB hub and plugged it straight into the computer’s USB port everything worked fine once again. It took a while to sync the 80GB but it got all the way through without ever running into that error again.

In summary, after trying a ton of different things, the actual steps I took that I think fixed it in my case were:

  1. Format and initialize the device (steps can be found here).
  2. Connect the Zune dock directly to the PC’s USB port.
  3. Connect the device and start a sync.

I suspect it won’t work for everyone who experiences the same errors as I’ve found tons of folks who have been dealing with this frustrating problem for a long time but it definitely worked for me and I’m hoping it does the trick for at least some other folks. I also posted the same info on a thread I found on the Zune Forums that’s been going strong for over a year. We’ll see if it helps anyone there soon.