I can imagine how frustrated I'd be in your situation, but are you sure it's not your MP3 files? If the firmware update was as buggy as you say, we'd have heard of more problems by now - which makes me wonder if it's your content (since content playback is what the problem is here). Try buying a single MP3 track from Amazon.com and see how that works...I'm interested to know. If that doesn't work, I suspect it might be a hardware problem.
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