Digital Home Thoughts: Dear Apple: Why Can't You Fix iTunes?

Dear Apple,

Last year I gave in, after years of telling friends and family to buy Rio and Creative MP3 players, and I bought a 30GB iPod. And boy, has life been great since. I subscribe to dozens of podcasts, and I dropped $100 to put an iPod interface in my car so I can listen to them through the car stereo. What a great product.

But lately, I haven't been using it. Ever since I've upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, iTunes has given me nothing but trouble. First, I couldn't get iTunes to sync properly with my iPod. Then you posted all those warnings about possibly bricking my iPod if I used it with Vista. So I was careful, and ejected my iPod manually, just like you said. Then last week I downloaded and installed iTunes 7.1.1.5, figuring it would make things better. I even got the latest recommended update from Microsoft for the iPod and iTunes.

Things got worse, much worse. Now when I startup iTunes, for some inexplicable reason, it causes my computer to crash. Completely. I get the blue screen of death pictured above. Then the computer restarts and chkdsk scans my hard drive, inevitably finding a few corrupted fragments. So now I'm not using iTunes for fear of hosing my entire PC, and I haven't sync'd my iPod in over a week. I'm disappointed. You've had a long time to figure out how to make iTunes and the iPod work with Windows Vista. What gives? Please, fix it, now; so I can go back to my formerly blissful life, iPod in pocket.

Thanks,
Jeremy Charette