Windows 10 / 11 Apple Software Update keeps trying to update iTunes even on latest version?

4 years ago something happened during a Windows 10 System Restore which broke Apple Software Update (ASU) for iTunes. Whenever Apple Software Update runs it thinks I'm not running the latest version of iTunes and says I should update.

If I try to let it run the update, it tries to download and apply the update and then it fails to upgrade. However, if I run Apple Software Update again, it just starts all over and thinks my installed version of iTunes is not current.

I have tried completely uninstalling iTunes and Apple Software Update, wiping out registry entries and reloading iTunes and re-importing my libraries and it still fails. I posted about this in 2019 and couldn't get a result and finally gave up. iTunes works fine and I just ignore ASU and use "Check for update" from iTunes and apply updates when they come out that way.

I am reigniting this post because I know I'm not the only one with this problem and today I noticed something that I think points to the problem. I recently started playing around with winget for doing package upgrades on Windows 11 and I stumbled across this curiosity:

C:\Windows\System32>winget upgrade | findstr "iTunes"
iTunes                               Apple.iTunes                          12.7.4.80        12.12.10.1           winget

Furthermore, a listing of all packages shows the following - which are two instances of the iTunes being installed:

C:\Windows\System32>winget list | findstr "iTunes"
iTunes                                  Apple.iTunes                            12.7.4.80           12.12.10.1   winget
iTunes                                  Apple.iTunes                            12.12.10.1                       winget

This is quite fascinating because 12.7.4.80 was the version of iTunes I was running back in 2018 when I had the system restore break ASU and iTunes update checks. So I suspect that, for whatever reason, that version and package has been a frozen-in-time ghost duplicate and winget and Apple Software Update keep seeing that and thinking I need to update.

The question is - how do I fix this?