Having worked tech support on the phone for iPods, I have no faith in this article, but it's worth a shot to try some of the steps, both the generic ones and the ones specific to the error codes. 40 may have something to do with security software on your computer, or combined with 1611 may POSSIBLY indicate a hardware problem. Like I said, run through the steps and see if it gets resolved or not.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1275