Leopard Parental Controls causes no connection to iTunes Store

Your dead-on... Just went thru this two nites ago. In my scenario, my daughter owns a MacBook which has Leopard on it and recently downloaded iTunes 7.7 As a responsible parent, I had Parental controls enabled from day 1 (Dec 2007 when I purchased MacBook). When she reported what you described to me (by the way, if you waited long enough to connect to iTunes Store, you would have received a "-50" Error msg). So I booted-up my MacBook Pro purchased in July 2006 which has Tiger on it, along with iTunes 7.7, I had no problem accessing iTunes Store. Turns out the problem lies between Leopard and iTunes 7.7 when Parental Controls are enabled. APPLE and iTunes are aware of this and working to resolve the issue. In the interim, the only work around is disabling Parental Controls for now, or Keeping Parental Controls enabled until your girl's want to access iTunes (my daughter is 14... so I am kept pretty busy. One other note... it isn't only iTunes which is affected, it also impacts other internet sites which normally are not worrisome sites. Hope this helps confirm your thoughts around this

Try using the iTunes Store from a web browser instead of directly in iTunes. http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/ I believe that you can leave parental controls on, access through the web, then purchasing won't be hindered.

Nope - I tried that and it didn't solve the problem. Only thing that helped was disabling Parental Controls.

Just got an iMac yesterday from the Apple Store for the family. I have a MacBook Pro (since Jan '08) which works great (no parental controls enabled), but want to get the family away from Windows by transitioning all our Windows boxes to iMacs (& possibly also Mac Minis). We have 5 Windows PCs which are getting hard to babysit. I thought switching to Macs will make the home computing environment much easier for me and the family...

Anyway, regarding the iMac purchased last night, I created a managed user, activated parent controls, but had trouble with Gmail in Firefox (even when all websites were allowed). However, the Admin user did not have the same trouble with Gmail in Firefox. Switched back to the managed user, same problems with Gmail in Firefox. It is not a problem logging into Gmail, but rather emptying the Spam folder once in Gmail, among some other issues. Gmail in the Firefox browser kept getting an error code (error 707 I think). I don't think it was an issue with Safari. However, my family likes the Google toolbar (which Safari does not have access to a Google toolbar), so our family is used to using Firefox.

Also, if the same issues are happening with the iTunes Store, my family is going to not be very happy and may make them more tolerable to Windows (which I am trying to steer them away from Windows)...

Based on these posts, the problem seems to be happening in a number of websites even if the parental controls are set to allow all websites.

Note to Apple: Please help!!! At minimum, not fixing these parental control will delay completing our transition from all Windows machines to all Macs.

Due to the great selling feature of the Leopard parental controls, this issue would seem to be letting a lot of parents down and increasing certain risks directly related to parents turning off the parent controls on the managed user accounts used by their children/family.

Having exactly the same issue - disable Parental controls and the problem goes away. The controls you set in iTunes preferences seem to be okay.

Disabling parental controls removes ALL the settings you painfully entered (approved emailers, iChatters, etc.) I have found a workaround for temporarily disabling parental controls and keeping the settings....

I simply create another account to be managed with parental controls, and copy and paste the control preferences from my child's account to the phantom account. (Controls to do this are found in the little gear wheel in the lower left corner of the prefs window.) So when she wanted to download, I copied her prefs to the phantom account, disabled her controls, let her download her song and when she was done, I went back and enabled her parental controls, and then copied the settings from the phantom account back to hers.

Obviously I going to have to leave the fake account active until Apple cleans up this little mess. At least now they made it easy for set up the same controls for multiple kids in the family!

First post on this is in May and Apple still has not fixed the bug?

I am having the same problem.

May, June, July, August, September == Unacceptable to wait this long for a fix...

Is it me, or is this still not fixed in 10.5.5?

Problem still occurs for me with 10.5.5.
(But website logging in Parental Controls stopped working for me some time ago anyway. So, sadly, I am losing nothing by disabling them.)

I have the same problem - all internet access seems to be blocked with parental controls enabled (google earth doesn't work, safari, ...). This is just after updating to 10.5.5. It did work fine before but I'm not sure if 10.5.5 update triggered the problem or just a coincidence.

Still not working for me either on a new iMac with 10.5.5. I am surprised that iTunes - Apple's own software will not work with the system parental controls (after two updates). I have left this open since 10.5.3 and now that the kids are back in school I want to use the parental controls - it was one of the big reasons I selected Apple. Apple needs to address this asap!

Another confirmation of EPIC FAIL under 10.5.5/iTunes8 for this problem. I tested this by creating a brand new Managed account, with default Parental Controls. No access to iTunes store from within iTunes 8 under new account. Changed the new account to "Standard", and access is allowed. I submitted a bug report: ID# 6232000.

If you use the search bar method and go to a song it will work. But if you want to redeem iTunes gift cards there is one way. When you are at a song, say it is a rock song click on the rock link at the bar above the page it should take you to a page similar to the home page and on the side the redeem button is there.

In response to my bug report, Apple says: "After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering."

I just downloaded the newest version of iTunes 8.0.1 (11). Still no fix for the parental control bug.
I also noticed that there are now 3 discussion threads on this topic, some of them started in June.
Apple, please fix this problem.

Leopard Parental Controls causes no connection to iTunes Store
http://discussions.apple.com/post!reply.jspa?threadID=1512896

Parental controls and iTunes store
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7524304&#7524304

Can't Access iTunes Store
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1697252&tstart=225

My signature in the previous post had the wrong Mac OS Version, I am running the newest version MacOS 10.5.5