Got a second iPod for the household because my wife and kids wanted to enjoy tuneage portability during the day while I have my iPod at work with me.

Needless to say, the prospect of having a second iPod with the same copy of iTunes, despite using multiple user accounts on Windows XP did not make this a simple matter of plug-n-play.

• Simply plugging in the second iPod with an up-to-date 4.7 copy of iTunes did not work; the iPod was not recognized by iTunes.
• I had to install the new iPod from the factory CD under my wife's user account. Because her account does not have admin privileges, I had to give them to her temporarily to accomplish this.
• I peeked at the registry and noticed that the iPod software keeps per-user registration settings, so the registration info under my wife's account holds the serial number for her iPod, while the registration info under my account holds my iPod's serial number.
• iTunes for Windows still does not like to have two copies of itself running at once, even under different user accounts. This sucks because I like to keep iTunes and iPodder running so that newly downloaded podcasts are dropped right into iTunes automatically. That would mean that my wife would be locked out of using iTunes.
• On the iPodder note, it would be nice if iPodder had a feature to manage downloads and republish messages over to iTunes. Might be high time to go join up on the iPodder mailing list.

Of course ITW is going to trail behind OSX, but it makes me wonder just how much the iTunes usability folks are exercising ITW.

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