Nontrivial Exercises

iTunes 5.0 Installation Troubles

I don’t actually have an iPod – YET, though I am accepting donations – but I have come to be a big user of iTunes. On my home computer I have ripped my entire CD collection to my computer using iTunes. I now have my complete music library on my PC, along with a few other songs that I have purchased from iTunes Music Store. As countless others have also discovered, iTunes is more than just an enabler for the iPod; it’s quite an amazing application on its own.

And, with support for podcasts in version 4.9, released a couple of months ago, it has become even more useful. On my work computer – my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC – I have set-up iTunes to pull the three or four podcasts that I listen to (among them: The Tablet PC Show, The Personal Productivity Show).

Last week, when I opened up iTunes on my Tablet PC to download the latest Tablet PC Show, a little dialog box popped up and informed me that a new version of iTunes was available, version 5.0, and would I like to download and install it. Well, I thought this would be fantastic. I couldn’t wait to see what Apple had cooked up now for this great app, and as a major release (5.0), not just a dot release. I clicked OK to get the new version, and that was almost the last time I was able to do anything with iTunes…

The download proceeded as expected, and then I ran the installation program. It informed me that it was installing a new version of QuickTime – 7.0 – as well as iTunes 5.0. OK, I thought, fine with me. A few minutes later, the installation completed and I was ready to try out version 5.0. I clicked my iTunes shortcut icon, waited a few seconds, then saw a troubling dialog box that said that I had QuickTime 6.5 installed, and that iTunes needed version 7.0. Strange, since it just told me it installed QuickTime version 7.0. Well, maybe it didn’t uninstall QuickTime 6.5 well enough. So, I went to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Remove A Program, and found that I had 2 instances of QuickTime installed in the list of programs. So, I clicked on the one that was the oldest, and uninstalled it. The uninstallation completed successfully.

Then, upon starting up iTunes again, I received the same error message about QuickTime 6.5. I proceeded to download iTunes again from the Apple website, install it again (QuickTime 7.0 was bundled with it again, so it said) and try to start it up. No luck – the same error about QuickTime 6.5. I then uninstalled QuickTime and iTunes from Control Panel Add/Remove programs, and tried it again. Same error.

Now, my frustration was growing. This was the first time that I’ve experienced any issues with an Apple application like this; this sort of trouble is usually reserved just for apps from smaller software companies. What was most frustrating, however, was that I could not go back to iTunes 4.9, since the Apple website didn’t have that version for downloading any more. I was stuck without being able to use iTunes at all.

At this point, I decided to look around for others that may have experienced similar issues. I just happened to read Michael Hyatt’s post about his trouble with iTunes 5.0. He uses a Mac PowerBook, and apparently his installation was fine, but he couldn’t get iTunes to recognize his iPod. Unfortunately, I don’t know if there is a problem with my Windows iTunes recognizing an iPod. Michael had some links to some helpful information and tips from others who have been experiencing similar troubles. It seems that the whole installation mechanism for iTunes 5.0 is riddled with issues for a Windows machine. I finally found some information that I needed, but I also had to improvize a bit to get it to work. After a little work and much more time than was necessary, I now have iTunes 5.0 successfully working on my Tablet PC.

Here’s what I had to do. This Apple support forum also details some useful information that helped me get this working.

1. Uninstall everything that says iTunes and QuickTime from my machine.
2. Delete all the QuickTime folders in the Program Files folder
3. Delete all the QuickTime keys in the registry under My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes ! This requires extreme caution, and you should make a backup of your registry before doing anything. Here are all the QuickTime keys that I had to delete.
4. Download the QuickTime Stanalone Installer, which just installs QuickTime 7.0, not bundled with iTunes.
5. Install QuickTime by itself from the stand-alone installer.
6. Download and install iTunes 5.0 via the standard iTunes 5.0 installer.

This whole experience was terrible for me, and as I see now, terrible and even worse for many others. This was a definite slip-up for Apple, and hopefulyl they will address the situation quickly and prevent similar errors from occurring in the future.