Apple :: Reinstall My PC And Worried About My IPod

First I must admit that I really did search both the main forums and even specifically in the Apple and Mac OS X forums and didn't find a really good answer to this question. It seems that mostly folks agree that iTunes itself should do a good enough job of backing things up.

Here's the deal...

My wife's notebook needs to have the OS reinstalled. Just to simply clean it up, make it faster, etcetcetc. In the past when we've done this everything always goes smoothly EXCEPT for the iPod.

She has a couple of purchased music on it, she has a couple of purchased games and even a movie, as well as TON of music, 20 GB or so (funny, we used to think that was a lot but it seems not, many people have several times this). The iPod has always given me difficulties with restoring only the purchased stuff, games and the music pieces we purchased legit. Twice before I have managed to cram things back on there with various 3rd party software but the names escape me since it typically takes several hours of installing this, trying this, uninstalling and try again with something else.

My wife's notebook is a PC and she is running Vista. When we go to 'reinstall' we are simply going to use the restore partition and install our other software from there.