Slow restarts with leopard, Ipod not detecting issues...

Im having a problem. Got a 20" alumium mac, and upgraded to leopard fine without a hitch or blue screen problem. Now after having to restart a couple times do to my new Ipod Nano not being auto detected i notice it takes about 3 minutes or so to do a restart when it took no more than a minute max on tiger. im trying to find a corralation between the 2 things happening but cant seem to figure it out. All i know is its taking extremely long to restart and my nano after being plugged in for a while will dissapear and even after unplugging it and plugging it back in it wont detect until i restart the computer and then it will autodetect. Any help would be appreciated.

 

I havent tried that yet since im running time machine and im on a wireless connection. How would unplugging my external drives speed up my restart time and not detecting my ipod. Not questioning you, just would like to know as it would be a pain in the butt to have to unplug my external drive everytime i restart just to it moves quicker.

 

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated at this point. Do you think a full shutdown and reboot would help. Maybe unplugging my external drive and rebooting for w/e reason. im open to suggestions. im more upset at the fact that a reboot is needed to detect my ipod not so much at the reboot speed since i rarely have to restart.