I got a shock today when starting up applications on my iPod Touch. Nearly every third party application was broken. Each quit back to the launcher after a second or so. After a few minutes panic and the usual restarts and soft resets (none of which worked), the penny dropped. I’d upgraded to iTunes 8.1 yesterday and the application problem was only since my sync. In other words, something in the new iTunes had blatted all over my applications.

In my year of owning an iPod Touch, this was my first real showstopping problem. But what to do? I’d be very surprised if this was a Touch problem – I’m guessing this is equally applicable to the iPhone as well. Half an hour’s Googling and I came across a reference to a similar problem encountered on a previous iTunes update by some users. I decided to try their solution – and also to try the iTunes/iPod backup system for real.
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If you’re a Windows Vista user like me [/FX: sound of a thousand Mac fans gasping] and have upgraded to the latest iTunes version, 8.0.1, you may be stuck looking at the following error message:

iTunes error

Apart from the relative inanity of an error for which the software knows the number but can’t translate into helpful English, there’s the question of how to fix it. It seems that the latest iTunes doesn’t like Vista ‘vanilla’ – I’m guessing that Apple have been testing it on fully patched Vista machines. In any case, the cure seems to be to install Vista Service Pack 1, released a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it takes an eternity to install, but at the end of an hour you’ll have Vista and iTunes cosy buddies once more.