It's threads like this that make me scared crapless to take my iPad within fifty feet of my PC.
People don't report the common non-event. Heck, if everyone reported every time they synced their iPad and nothing bad happened there wouldn't be anything else here to read.
I'm not saying there is not cause to be careful. There are certainly enough reports for that. There are not enough to suggest it's an epidemic.
You should take the time to read over the iPad's manual and become familiar with how iTunes syncing works. Most problems are cause by misunderstanding what is or is not backed up, and what the sync settings actually do. For instance, turning off syncing almost always means removing that content from the iPad, but people often think it just means it won't make any more changes. Only a handful of reports are actually about iTunes bugs and failures.
Make sure you do your backups of both the iPad and computer, and never risk having important documents stored just on the iPad. These are things you should be doing anyway. At least if you have important, non-replaceable stuff on your iPad and/or computer.
In a way it's all because iTunes does too much. Like using Word, it's easy enough if you just leave everything alone and go along with the default settings, but the minute you start trying to accomplish something a bit different it is easy to make mistakes. Worse, because the program as grown as a series of add ons, it's not terribly consistent. Only when you've really learned its ins and outs do the extra features start to be more useful than dangerous.
This is so atypical of Apples software it is very annoying to long time Mac users. Windows users are even more annoyed because even some of the things that are consistent with Apple are new and unusual already. And Apple dose almost as poor a job of writing software for Windows as Microsoft does of writing software for Macs (admittedly the MS Office suite has improved in recent years). They just don't' think alike.
Anyway, one last thing. Pretty much everything above is unsubstantiated opinion. So take it for what it's worth, and since you got it for free (minus the time to read), that's not a lot.
