ILoathe and iHate iTunes 7.3 and Apple's lack of support

Question

Like thousands of other people, I found iTunes 7.3 is unusable on my machine due to the error "The iTunes library file cannot be saved. An unknown error occurred (-50)." It has been nearly one week and Apple has not officially commented upon the error let alone fixed it. In addition, reverting to iTunes 7.1 and 7.2, which worked for several days, now fails upon loading due to a runtime error. So despite USERS having worked on the issue and found an apparent work around, I cannot implement it. This effectively makes my computer useless for playing music or podcasts. Thank god I did not buy the iPhone or AppleTV or I would be even more livid. Given Apple's lack of concern for it's customers, I will have to rethink ever switching over from Windows to a Mac.
Home Built   Windows XP Pro  
Home Built   Windows XP Pro  
Home Built   Windows XP Pro  

Answer 1

Have you even bothered phoning tech support? iTunes
is a fully supported program over the phone (free if
you have a warranted product, $29 otherwise). So,
even though you think that Apple is refusing to help,
you're wrong. Tech support number is
(1-800-275-2273).
No, I did not phone tech support as I do not have any Apple products that are under warranty. In addition, several people who claim they did call Apple support, after there were 25,000 views on this issue, were told that they were the only people who had this problem and their issue was not resolved.
Now, for this issue, try the following:
For the runtime error, completely remove iTunes and
Quicktime
(http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93698)
. After it they are removed, just to make sure,
download the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301), and then
remove all references of iTunes and Quicktime.
Thank you. When I used the Add/Remove Programs to uninstall iTunes I mistakenly believed that I was UNINSTALLING iTunes. Silly me. Going in deleting additional files as mentioned in the document did allow me to re-install 7.2. For that I sincerely thank you. This allowed me to remove all podcasts (keeping the files) while in 7.2. Video podcasts are the alleged cause of the failure of the 7.2 to 7.3 upgrade to work properly.
Try re-installing iTunes 7.3, and see if it gives you
the same message. If it gives you a message saying
the library couldn't be saved, try this:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93313.
When I installed 7.3 without any podcasts being in my library it installed correctly. Since I did not delete my files I was able to import the podcast folder back and then resubscribe to my podcasts. iTunes 7.3 appears to be working correctly now. The document that you link to would also have fixed this. Thank you for posting the link.
If you get a (-50) error while trying to put songs on
the iPod, try this article:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304996
I have not been brave enough to put my iPod into the cradle yet.
P.S. I love the whole "Apple's lack of concern"
quote, as well. Notice how each of the problems you
described have an article you can now reference with?
Well, each of those articles have been around for
months. "Apple's lack of concern" has effectively
turned into "your lack of searching".
Cheers.
Do I feel Apple is not properly supporting this issue? Yes. Apple has known for days that the 7.3 iTunes upgrade will destroy the file library of thousands of iTunes users. There is no warning, no official comment on the support forums that I could find, and no 7.3 fix. I consider that poor support. If you feel good customer support is forcing users to spend their time searching thousands of forum posts on this one problem, most of which did not offer solutions, and make them uninstall/reinstall software, and their library files that is fine. I think it is unacceptable.
None-the-less, I thank you for taking the time to post the document links which were quite helpful.
Home Built Windows XP Pro