Microsoft isolated on Wednesday the bug in its older Zune music players that had the devices crashing on December 31. The fix? Wait a day.

The bug occurred in the way that the clock driver of the older 30GB Zune music players handled leap year, Microsoft said in a statement on Wednesday. The software giant told its customers to have patience and perform a hard reset on the following day. On Thursday, reports on support forums had confirmed that most music players were returning to life.

"We know this has been a big inconvenience to our customers and we are sorry for that, and want to thank them for their patience," Microsoft said in a statement.

On Wednesday, hundreds of users complained that their Zune music players had frozen upon start up at the splash screen. Microsoft confirmed that the older 30GB Zune devices, introduced in 2006, had a bug that caused the players to freeze.

While most users appeared to successfully reset their devices on January 1, some devices remained non-functional, according to post on support forums.

"I'm still frozen too," wrote one user on the forums of Zune.net. "I've tried every suggestion on every forum about this topic. I've done a hard reset, let the battery die and then recharge. Everything continues to freeze on the dreaded Zune screen. I'm at a loss."

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