I’ve had my amazingly tiny iPod shuffle for a few months now and it’s been great for clipping onto my shirt collar while cycling etc. I love it and it’s never given me any trouble.
Until last Tuesday…
I plugged it into my PC to update its playlist and give the battery a charge but the PC refused to recognise it all of a sudden. Windows gave the little sound it does when a USB device is plugged in or unplugged but iTunes wouldn’t pop up like it normally does and I eventually got a Windows message saying something to the effect of “One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it”.
So I try it in a few other PCs and get the same response. Now the iPod works fine otherwise, if I plug the earphones in I can listen to tunes just fine, so I figure maybe it needs a reset or something. So I go to plug it back into my main PC but before the USB plug reaches the plug, there’s a spark to the case, the PC switches off and there’s a burning smell.
Oh crap!
I turn the PC back on and get a warning that the processor has changed, press F2 to continue or F1 to enter setup (or something like that), but it’s frozen and that’s the closest that PC will ever get to booting up again. The motherboard is fried. 
After replacing the motherboard after not even two months since I fried the last one, I then learn that the boot sectors on both my hard drives have been lost and no amount of chkdsk or replacing the hive and so on will get things happening.
So I’m back to formatting.
Oh joy oh joy. At least this time I was adequately backed up but my PC is still a nightmare to reinstall with lots of specialised applications and takes a good 20 hours of solid work to get back to operating the way I need it to.
D’oh! D’oh! D’oh!
Lessons learned:
1. Get a USB hub if hot swapping USB devices
2. Don’t use important PCs for non-essential tasks if you can help it.
3. Ghost complex installations using DriveImage XML or similar.
Many thanks to my old mate Rustty for losing almost as much sleep as I did to get me up and running again and for having the most amazing collection of spares around his house that I’ve ever known anyone to have. I swear there’s enough around that place to put a lot of PC shops to shame… 
BTW, I took the iPod back to the place I bought it from and after trying it on another USB cable it appeared to be fine, so they swapped my cable for theirs and away I went and all’s been good with it since. For some strange reason they seemed reluctant to try my cable in one of their PCs though…