Windows 8.1 Pro will not boot after installing iTunes 11.1.5.5

It's a little hard for me to accept that this is true, but the symptoms seem to be pointing the direction of the title of this thread. I have an all-in-one touch-screen Gateway computer that came with windows 7 (yeah, a win7 machine that came with touch, yeesh) and I put windows 8.1 pro 64-bit on it with a clean install (actually windows 8 was the clean install and then I did the free microsoft store upgrade to 8.1). It has 4GB of RAM and has a Pentium Dual Core cpu @ 2.2 Ghz. It was running fine with the previous version of iTunes, but as soon as I updated to iTunes 11.1.5.5 (and there may have been other apple things that updated too (ie quicktime of course), the computer prompted me for a reboot and froze during the reboot process (before it even shut down). Then it had trouble booting into windows. I ran startup repair to no avail and decided to do a sytem restore. My most recent restore point was from a few weeks back, before iTunes was even installed at all on the machine. I went back to that point and the machine worked fine again. Then I installed iTunes 11.1.5.5 and the same exact problem occurred - it froze while shutting down after the iTunes install and then would not boot into windows 8. I did another system restore and have not put iTunes back on. The system is working fine. I'm going to try to find out if there's a way to download older versions of iTunes, so that I can install it, but the bigger issue here is: Is this a legitimate bug/incompatibility with some hardware or software or driver that I have on this computer? I run a computer support business so I know my way around but I don't have time to troubleshoot this from scratch. Anyone else seeing this? Apple employees...a little help here? Any input?