I have tried all of the things mentioned in this thread, up to today, April 10, 2012. We have 2 current iphones, 2 legacy 1st gen iphones, and 2 ipods (One 2nd gen nano and one 3rd gen 80 gb ipod), and they all synced until about 10 days ago (could have been longer that they were unable to sync, but we charge our phones in the car, on sound docks, etc, so we only sync when we need to update something.) We have 2 windows vista computers, which operate fine otherwise. Our devices will not show up in itunes, but also do not show up in windows under the drives, and will not show up in device manager.
I have uninstalled ALL apple products and reinstalled them on BOTH computers. We have 12 (yes, 12) apple USB white cables, and 4 cables of other manufacturers (Belkin, etc...) and NONE of them work to have one of the any of these devices show up on either computer. We even tried rolling back itunes, but the library will not read unless you have at least 10.6 for windows on the computer - 10.5.3 comes back with an error message saying that it cannot read the library. We cannot uninstall the device in device manager, because none of the devices ever show up.
Apple Mobile Services is already on automatic start.
Here is the list of things from the links listed in notes from others above:
All of these have been looked into or performed, when possible.
The idea of wiping my entire computer to reinstall everything would require a me starting a lawsuit with Apple. This problem is VERY widespread, if you look over the web - I believe the reason that people aren't as furious in massive numbers is precisely the reason why we never thought anything about it until 2 days ago - people don't sync every day, because they have peripheral charging devices, and unless they are making a change, they don't need to sync daily, right? The fact that it happened after the very last update for itunes is terribly suspicious - we always brace for something to go wrong when the new itunes update comes out - we just weren't prepared to be "cut off" with the last one. This is happening in a widespread way for people on both Mac and Windows platforms - see the issue with the idea of it being a problem with restarting devices, reloading individual software, etc? This is a MULTI-PLATFORM issue, and stems from 10.6.1 itunes update from March 28, 2012 for Windows and the Mac counterpart, or from the previous update 10.6 on March 7, although I am pretty sure we synced after the March 7th update at least once with both of our current iphones.
This needs priority from Apple, or people are going to "stop drinking the kool-aid" that they are offering, if they can't be trusted not to use the entire Apple community as unknown beta testers for new versions of itunes, disabling ALL Apple products on ALL platforms. I would think Apple would have made some kind of public announcement about the issue considering both Mac and Windows users can't see their ipods, iphones, and ipads now. Nothing - Steve Jobs wouldn't have left this issue unresolved at the possible cost of people jumping ship.
I believe it is a new day, and I will take my unsynced phone and move my service to a non-Apple phone. I have been contemplating this for a while, but this update makes changes to our computers making our devices totally useless for future changes, including changing music, syncing contacts, iOS updates, so why are we staying with Apple? Samsung has over 20 versions of their Galaxy products on T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. I think we shall take them up on the idea of not "staying with the herd" this time. Apple - you have 24 hours to acknowledge that there is a HUGE problem here, and I will give you 3 days to fix it for both Mac and Windows platforms. If you can't, you don't deserve our business.