Not one to unnecessarily provocatively title things, I must relay a most distressing message: I won't be answering your feedback for a couple more days. Sorry! Read on if you want to know why, or skip the venting.

My aging Windows XP install having degenerated most foully, I've been switching to Windows 7 RC 64-bit for the past two days. And after much fiddling with video card drivers and Gnu utilities, everything was going great, until iTunes happened.

One of the problems with the previous install is that iTunes never worked. I thought, surely it'll be fine now! But the deviousness was much higher than even I had imagined.

I think part of Apple's corporate strategy is to code iTunes for Windows as unstably and invasively as they can get away with, so that Windows users will become frustrated with their now-chaotic operating system and go Mac. Why else would it need to install 80 programs and 4 always-on processes and mess with my CD-ROM driver just to transfer data to my phone?

Anyway, iTunes has exhibited 4 types of system-hanging errors so far, each of which I've been able to hack around, although if this last one works, it'll be at the expense of one of my hard drives. It's caused 10 reboots and 50 invocations of Task Manager, caused 7 program uninstalls and reinstalls, crashed Explorer 6 times, and made it so that I cannot normally shut down my computer. And when it's in its throes, my email runs too slowly to brook.

So yeah; once all bludgeoning has ceased and I jut triumphantly from the cowed and battered heap that once was the bull elephant iTunes, I'll get back to it.

Know that sort of feeling (and once again I am not quite unhappy about being spared that particular hassle because I don't have an iphone/ipod).

You might be right....what incentive does Apple really have to make it wonderfully compatible with Windows? Obviously, if it's not usable that wouldn't be good...but if a few people get frustrated and switch to Macs, so much the better for them.

Good luck with getting it all running properly again!

My thoughts and prayers go out to you and your computer. iTunes is RIDICULOUS. It's like a dirty negotiator.

You want a sexy iPod? First, you'll have to marry her ugly sister, iTunes.

You want to rip a CD? That's fine, but you have to put them in m4a file formats so that nothing can play it except iTunes.

Hey, you want to burn an audio CD? Oooh here's the funny part, if you want burn an MP3 CD, then you'll have to use MP3 files to create it. You know, that file format that iTunes doesn't ever rip files into.

Depending on the day certain albums sync with my iPod and other days no luck. It's not like I'm even close to the capacity. I think, it just doesn't like the Super Action Heroes ft. Johnny Rabb "the world's fastest drummer".

Thoughts and prayers indeed! 董伴 nailed it.

Compatibility sucks, not to mention the DRM issues. So I pay for music, and then I'm unable to listen to it because of a lack of internet connection, or I've authorized the song on five machines already, I forgot my iTunes Store password, whatever. God I hate iTunes.

I got rid of itunes because it kept shafting up the file naming/folder system of my music, over writing tags so that when I played them in anything else all of the info was gone.

At the time I had an ipod but just started syncing it through winamp and had no problems...then my ipod got nicked

Although I think the ipod is a great piece of kit I hate apple, they just try and lock you in to all of their stuff which is loaded with so many restrictions.

@murrayjames, if you search the Apple website, it actually tells you how to deauthorize all of your computers and reauthorize only the ones you currently use. Unless you already use it on over 5 computers...then I guess that won't work.

Chloe, thanks. Time to deauthorize 5 computers :-)