The fix is to wait for 1 day

First of all, that piece of code was written by Freescale as part of their driver for the RTC chip. No wonder Freescale is rapidly losing its market share everywhere. It's a shame that the former No. 2 semiconductor company got trashed so quickly. Sigh ...

Many people still reported that their Zune 30GB players remain dead after Jan 1st. The battery is drained beyond a point that the player cannot power up any more. Standard USB is limited to 100mA. That's no enough to boot up and charge the battery. It seems that the Zune needs to power up first before enabling the charging logic. This becomes a deadlock situation. A possible fix is to acquire a USB wall charger that can pump out >100mA, probably 200mA would be enough.