Here's the story: I recently tried to update my iPod touch 4th Gen. to iOS 4.3. I did make a backup yesterday at 6:30PM, then I clicked update in iTunes. That's when everything went to hell. The first update didn't work. There was an error (I don't remember the exact error) and the update failed. I could still use my iPod, but none of my apps would open. I tried the update again and, after some more trouble, it seemed to work. However this time I couldn't get to my music. It said "You must sync your iPod with iTunes first before you can use Music."
I tried this, but no matter how many times I synced, this problem would not go away. So I figured I would just restore it from my backup. This doesn't work. I keep getting this error: "Could not restore because the backup failed." It says this for every backup. I've tried completely restoring the iPod to both 4.3 and 4.2 and nothing works.
It seems to me like there is a communication issue between the iPod and my (crappy) PC. When I click "restore from backup" this weird little window pops up in iTunes with an indefinite progress bar. Its title is "Restoring from backup" and under the progress bar it says "Estimating time remaining." The real interesting part is that the iPod is unaffected. It doesn't change to the "Restore in Progress" screen or "Sync in Progress" or anything.
I'm really at a loss here.