I have written several times in the last few months about my Zune and how I like the device. On my blog I also published some problems I was experiencing with the Zune. Well, this week has been a Zune ‘fun’ week with mixed results and a good ending. All my digital media is stored on a separate machine, in fact the only machine I am currently running Windows XP on. Last Monday I decided it was time to synchronize my Zune, because I had downloaded some additional music from the Zune Marketplace. This started a few days of frustration. When I booted the XP machine it informed me that it had found some important updates, so I downloaded and installed them without even looking what they were. It turned out that one of those updates was a Media Player 11 update. After rebooting the system, everything looked good so I hooked up my Zune. It started synchronizing nicely, but when I connected it back to my home stereo system, trying to play some of the new songs, the Zune informed me that all my licenses were expired, even though my Zune subscription is valid for another two months. My first thougth was that something went wrong while synchronizing, so I cleaned the Zune entirely and synchronized all content again, an exercise that took several hours, because initial synchronization with a Zune is not the fastest process and my device is pretty much filled. Finally I reconnected it again to the home stereo system to find out that again all my licenses were expired. This was a pretty bad experience. For starters, why is content with no valid license copied to the Zune? Wouldn’t it be better to just don’t bother copying that content, since you can’t play it back anyway? Secondly, why were my licenses indicating they were expired? Not knowing what to do anymore I decided to call the Zune help desk. Having bad experiences with help desks in general, I was preparing myself for the worst. But hey, this was a new experience. I didn’t have to wait too long for an actual person to speak to, and I got some real assistance. The guy answering my questions knew what he was talking about. What a concept for a help desk! Other companies could learn from this. Even though I got help and a workaround to solve my problems, the solution was not really pretty. The Windows XP update for Media Player 11 had a nasty side effect. It caused the licenses on the Zune player to become invalid. So the solution was to remove that update from my system, remove all content from the Zune again and synchronize all content back to the Zune. After another several  hour wait, luckily my Zune worked properly. However, it would be nice if updates to the operating system are also tested to work with the whole range of devices people might use. I know that testing for all scenarios becomes more complex by the day, but this kind of errors are in my opinion unacceptable. When talking to the Zune help desk, I also got an early announcement that new firmware for the device would be released within a week. That information was also true. Today I just installed version 1.3 of the Zune firmware. It looks like my license problems are history, even though I once again installed the Media Player update. Even better, the device performs much better. It used to have problems during the first 30 seconds of playback of a song with Digital Rights Management enabled, unless you left the backlight of the device on. Luckily, this is not necessary anymore with the current firmware, so I can preserve battery life of the Zune and it will now hopefully last on an 11 hour flight between Amsterdam and LA. So a week that began with some frustration ended pretty well. Surely, I have had some problems with my Zune, but for now they seem to be history. Now I can only hope that other teams within Microsoft will deliver similar great work. In that case I would be able to run Visual Studio 2005 with all tools for device development without problems on my Windows Vista development machines. If that only were true as well. Boy, I would be a happy person by then.