What the heck is going on?

[Crowelld]

I've been having a few quirks with the old 5th gen ipod video this week. First, the ipod appears to only be "sort of" attached the the computer. By this I mean that it appears in iTunes and updates everything, but it does not appear in Finder or on the Desktop.
Secondly, every time it syncs, it tells me that 4 files could not be synced because they could not be found. I click the little details thing and I see the titles of four podcasts listed. Try as I might, I cannot locate them in my library or on my computer. I have run spotlight, expanded every folder in iTunes and hunted for little exclamation points to no avail. It is soooooo frustrating! While both of these are minor annoyances, they are annoyances nonetheless.

I am running iTunes 7.4.2 on OSX Leopard. iPod software 1.2.1

[ThreeDee]

Hi, if iTunes cannot find a file (due to it being deleted manually in the Finder or something), it will stay in the list, and there will be a "(!)" mark next to the file. This means iTunes knows that the file has been moved/deleted, and wants you to do something about it.

You can try and find the file to fix the (!) symbol, or you can simply remove it from the list by selecting the file and pressing Delete.

[EatsWithFingers]

By this I mean that it appears in iTunes and updates everything, but it does not appear in Finder or on the Desktop.
Sounds like you've disabled disk mode. It can be re-enabled from within iTunes (on the iPod Summary tab).

Secondly, every time it syncs, it tells me that 4 files could not be synced because they could not be found. I click the little details thing and I see the titles of four podcasts listed. Try as I might, I cannot locate them in my library or on my computer.
As ThreeDee says, this is because iTunes cannot find the files. SInce you've tried to locate them on your Mac and failed, you can either delete the entries from iTunes, or re-download them.

[Crowelld]

As I said in the initial post, I have searched high and low in itunes and cannot find the (!) icon next to any files. Not in the general music area, movies, podcasts, tv shows or anything. THAT is why I am so confused. I have expanded all collapsed folders and looked in there too.

[Crowelld]

Update: Apparently they were buried in a playlist I had created. I never thought to look in there. This seems strange to me as i thought the "smart" playlist updated itself, but when I deleted that playlist, the problem went away. Who knows!