It has been more than I year since I used an iPod with a PC, but my experience with a 10gig 2nd-gen iPod was similar, crashes and unreliability on an old laptop with firewire built in, but - it turned out - the wrong sort of firewire. It did work alright on my fairly new (at the time) T30 Thinkpad, but it still wasn't smooth. ISTR that was before iTunes was available on the PC, because the bundled software was horrible.
It's a shame, because on the Mac they really do "just work" - my mother, who considers a fridge to be a technical challenge, was able to get one working with an iMac in 15 minutes, 5 of which was trying to work out how to eject the iPod once iTunes was done ripping the CD. Given the flakiness on the PC i'm surprised at times that so many people buy them.