I tunes will not open - have read ALOT but still can't get it going

Question

How much is Apple losong out to what appears to be a fairly common but complicated problem. Not sure if it all started the day I upgraded to i-tunes 9 or when I renewed my Norton Anti Virus. It was working for months even when I had Norton which i have since removed using the Norton Removal Tool. When I first click on it it tries to open and I get a message saying that my Quick Time software is outdated but BEFORE I can click on that another box opens over top that says "i-tunes has stopped working" "a problem has caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close he problem and notify you if a solution is found"
If i try again , nothing happens at all. When I go to processes I can see where it appears briefly maybe 2-3 seconds then disappears.
I have tried:
Making another user account and opening I-tunes
Removing my Norton anti virus
Uninstalling and re-installing i-tunes and quick time both together and separately....many many times
restoring previous version of i-tunes
I get the same message if i try to open just quicktime.
My i -tunes library itself will also not open.
Please tell me where to go from here
I am running a newer (3 months old) HP with Windows 7 64 bit
IDEAS???
Rob.

Answer 1

Excellent news, Rob! Glad you're up and running again.
Any idea as to how it got this way? I am thinking of re-installing my Norton since it has worked well for me for the last few years and I an not exactly sure if that was the problem or if was a Windows 7 thing?
I reckon Norton and Windows 7 were innocent parties here. Some other application dumped a couple of boatloads of QuickTime componentry in your sysWOW64. (Older versions of codec packs, video converter software, other file converter software, and media players that offer the opportunity to use quicktime files "without installing QuickTime" are the usual culprits here, but some games might do this too.) That might go unnoticed so long as that componentry matches the existing version of QuickTime software that you have installed on the PC ... but things turn to custard when you have to update your QuickTime version, and the versions of the componentry in /sysWOW64/ no longer match your "QuickTime proper". (On 32-bit systems, the same sort of thing happens, with the difference being that the "foreign" QuickTime componentry would typically be lurking down in the system32 folder.)
So, we pretty much get cases of this sort of thing showing up constantly at the forums, with a big pulse in reports happening after any QuickTime version update. (It produces a significant proportion of the "iTunes has encountered a problem" and "iTunes has stopped working" messages that we get reported here.) You were really unlucky in that you got a rarer version of the possible error messages ... so there's not as much relevant troubleshooting advice available on the web, which makes researching what could possibly be going wrong for you considerably harder than it is for folk with the more common versions of the error messages.