iTunes on Vista = BAD CRASH!

Thanks for the suggestion! Tried it, and still having the same issues. See my more detailed post next.

Thanks for the help. The blue screen said "Kernel Stack_ImageError" before the PC crashes (BTW, it is a Dell XPS Gen 5 desktop tower, running Vista Ultimate). Unfortunately, it doesn't stay up long enough before crashing for me to see much else...

We've tried everything that's been suggested on creating new libraries and it ALWAYS crashes when re-importing the library. So, we finally gave up and determined that we wouldn't be able to save the old library and just decided to dump the old library and re-import the music fresh into a new library.

However, when we did this, only about 1,900 of almost 8,000 songs made it in on a completely new library (and new install of iTunes)...and then we got the following error: "The iTunes library cannot be saved. The required file cannot be found." This was quickly followed by another blue screen (didn't say kernel error this time) but still crashed the computer and required three cold boots to get back into Windows).

So, here's what I think at this point:

Obviously our library got corrupted at some point in this process. In addition, I am also guessing that at least some of the music files have also become corrupt (since our last attempt had dumped all the old library info and just straight imported the music). This might have happened because I originally copied the music to a Mac-formatted network drive before the Vista upgrade...and then had to copy to my MacBook and THEN finally back to the PC in order for Vista to recognize it (I didn't realize at the time that Vista wouldn't be able to see a Mac external drive). Something along the way obviously didn't work.

**Here's what would be helpful to know now:**

-Other than the music files themselves being corrupt, is there anything else I should consider or try?
-All the music IS on my wife's iPod...is there anyway to copy this back to a new iTunes library? Are there any third party apps that do this well if Apple doesn't support it (probably 2/3 of the music is ripped from CDs and the rest was all purchased on iTunes).

Thanks so much for all your great help already...hopefully we are close to a solution!

Warmly,
Dave

Thanks for the suggestion. None of this works either.

I uninstalled iTunes, did a full disk check, and then reinstalled. On the first open, I created a new library in an alternate location (FYI - I have long since given up on my old library and all the posts above refer to using new libraries).

Upon opening with the new library, everything was fine and no music was there. I DID NOT import my music that I have on disk in the music folder, but rather just downloaded a video pdocast. After downloading and playing it, I started to get the choppy playback again (i.e. would frezze for 5-10 seconds every 20 seconds or so and then resume). Eventually (after about 3 minutes) everything crashes and I'm back to a blue screen with the top line this time being "Kernel data_imageerror" and again have to cold boot twice to get back into Vista.

Everything else on Vista is working perfectly and there are never problems until we try to use iTunes. The good news is that I suppose the above eliminates the conclusion that something is wrong with my music files, since I never touched them this time.

Are there other Vista/iTunes issues that I'm not aware of that I should be trying? Are there known conflicts with other programs? Is this some kind of registry issue? I'm not really sure what to do next since iTunes doesn't work right with anything, much less our music on disk.

Thanks for any insight,

Dave

Thanks to everyone for their help.

After 5 hours on the phone with Apple and Dell over Labor Day weekend, I've come to the conclusion that iTunes won't work on this computer (also tried the new 7.4 version to no avail).

Unfortunately, we're too far invested in having put software on the machine to attempt a re-install of Windows. We'll just have to run her iTunes stuff off my MacBook Pro until a better solution comes along.

Thanks again to everyone who helped with suggestions!

Peace,
Dave

Turns out that this is a known issue.

See Apple support articles #306526 and #305392.

Best,
Dave