Fix for Creative ZEN V Plus won't connect: Code-10
I just spent the better part of my afternoon figuring out what the hell was wrong with my girlfriend's Creative ZEN V Plus MP3 player. It froze yesterday and hasn't been able to connect to our computers since. Everytime she turned it on, it said Rebuilding Library, but it normally only does that during the boot immediately after it froze and has to be manually reset. It wouldn't connect in Linux, and in Windows the obnoxious balloon tips would report "MTP device found" again and again. In the Device Manager, it reported "Code 10: Device cannot start." Well, we finally found a fix.
Searching for zen v plus code 10 turns up 287,000 results including countless forum threads with no helpful replies. The most common suggestion is to uninstall the device in Device Manager, but trying this numerous times did nothing to help.
Many threads from Microsoft's social.answers.microsoft.com show the exact same problem reported over and over again, but no helpful responses.
After wasting hours searching the internet, we discovered the ZEN's Recovery Mode. You enter it by turning on the ZEN while holding down the Play button.
Selecting "Clean up" performs some magic which I cannot explain. Then select Reboot. When your ZEN comes back to life, it'll happily connect to your computer.
What an obnoxious problem. You'd think Creative would have written this article a few years ago, but they'd probably rather you junk your ZEN V Plus and hand over another hundred dollars for whatever their newest model is.