My nano has never been plugged into firewire, but whenever it has battery, it displays an error message saying "FireWire connections are not supported, to transfer songs, please connect the USB cable provided Press Center to dismiss" I pressed center but it wont go away. After awhile it seems to time out, but it only displays a blank list menu, no options, just the "ipod" silver bar at the top. It wont play music, and when i plug it into the computer Windows says the device has malfunctioned and is not recognized. I cannot Restore it becuase the computer doesnt recognize it. Please help

Holy Cow,
Have you tried resetting your iPod Nano by toggling the Hold switch on and off and then pressing and holding the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple Logo appears?

Read more about it at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61705.

Same problem ("Firewire not supported" freeze); took almost a whole day to find fix. Here's what I did:
1)I plugged another USB device into the port to make suree it worked. It did.
2) I tried another Ipod cable to make sure it wasn't a cable problem. Still no fix.
3) I plugged the Ipod into a different computer which had USB ports on the rear of the machine. Bingo! Ipod came back to life. I found several posts stating that front mounted USB ports tend to be squirrely and offer less power than rear ones.
4) I was now able to place the Ipod into disk mode and verify that the files were intact and there was no damage to the drive (scandisk).
5) I rebooted out of disk mode and started I-tunes on computer #2 and the Ipod was recognized. On the healthy USB port it began to charge normally and several hours later has a full charge and is back to normalcy.
6) I reattached Ipod to original computer, front USB port, and the Ipod was also recognized on this computer. Can't explain why it happened, but please try this and see if it's a fix that works for this issue consistently.

I've been dealing with this problem for a few days now...on a USB port that has been worknig for years.

I just moved it to a different USB port on the same computer (equivalent of moving from front to back, though all 6 are on back) - and that was it.

I've tried a bunch of other things - rebooting - putting into diagnostics mode - throwing it at the wall...

Anyway - thannnnks.