Jason,
I am having this issue on my zune30. I power down my Zune by holding down the pause button to place the zune in the sleep mode. I have notice since updating it to the 2.2 firmware that my battery life is crap...
I let my zune charge up for 6 hours the other night by connecting to my laptop they way I have done for the last 6 months and got the green battery icon on the zune. I then unplugged it and plugged back in as I was planning a long car trip the next day. Checked it before going to bed and it had another green plugged.
Got in the car the next day went to power on my Zune and got the black screen with the battery icon with the ! in the center. It wouldn't do anything from this point. I was rather ticked off since I even downloaded a few new albums from the marketplace that I was looking forward to listening too...
I looked in the zune.net support forums and there are a number of people with the same issues. No response in the forums that I could find from MS. Jason can you make some calls or emails to your contacts to find out anything about this???
Some were suggesting to do the full power down of the Zune but I haven't tried this but again I never did this prior to the firmware upgrade and never had this problem.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated. As my zune has become useless. I will try and call the support line tomorrow or Wednesday as I am currently on business trip and had to leave my trusty companion at home because I thought at first that is was an issue with my zune...