My PC won't read my iPod... help!

I know someone out in dgrin land will give me an answer for this. Today for the first time, I wanted to use my iPod as an external hard drive. I have a DVD burner on my lab PC, so I wanted to make a hard backup of some photos. Turned off all the auto update stuff in iTunes and copied on a whole bunch of image files onto the iPod. Plugged it in to the PC and it threw a fit and said "blah blah blah Bill Gates is a freak blah blah malfunctioned blah blah for more help, ah nevermind, you're screwed". No big deal, but it won't read the iPod at all.

I went searching a bit and found out that (makes sense) my iPod is formated as a Mac, and therefore the PC can't read it. I found XPlay, but at $30 it seems like more than I need. Anyone know of anything simpler, maybe freeware that will just let me use the iPod to transfer files from Mac to PC?

Thanks!