In similar vein, I have exactly the same set up. When I first set it up I changed WMP to rip music directly to the external HDD and this worked fine.
Suddenly it stopped doing it and ripped music to the My music folder instead. No problem thought I, I will go to the tools options in WMP and change it back again. However it won't allow me to change the rip folder. I've run as an administrator, re-installed and everything but I can't make it work.
Sure I can cut and paste the folders from My Music to the external HDD but its a bit of a pain.
Any ideas?
Ta