iPhone 4 Upgrade issues

I'm having a rough time upgrading my iPhone 4. I connected the iPhone to the PC via USB. The device was recognized fine. Upon hitting the "Update" button the process begins to work. At some point in time it attempts install drivers; eventually the drivers are not installed successfully and my iPhone goes into recovery mode. I usually have to restore it on my laptop at which point in time I can re-try the upgrade on my PC.

I'm apprehensive to update iTunes on my laptop because that is my only means of restoring my iPhone 4.

Some things I've done to try and correct the issue(NOTE: I have 64 bit Windows 7):

1. Uninstall/Re-install the most up to date version of iTunes and all components such as Quicktime, Bonjour etc. I even did it in a specific order.

2. Restart the PC and iPhone 4 after Uninstall and Re-installation of iTunes.

3. Manually updating drivers for "Apple Mobile Device USB" and "MTP USB Device" using usbaapl64. I go through the whole right click > update driver software > browse my computer for driver software > let me pick > chose a device and "have disk" > browse > and I try from both of the following directories *C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Mobile Device Support\Drivers* and *C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Apple\Mobile Device Support\Drivers*. The second directory didn't even have a Drivers folder in it at first. I copied and pasted the driver folder in Mobile Device Support in second directory.

I'm really unsure how to proceed. I'd like to upgrade my iPhone to 4.2 but the amount of time I'm spending coupled with the lack of results is very disheartening.

Message was edited by: LiVigni