ITunes Stopped Working - Apple Pull Your Finger Out And Fix It Please!!!

Question

Okay so this is a similar story to hundreds I have seen.
The other day I opened iTunes (7.0.2) Which has been working fine for years (Obvioously with previous versions).
It opened up and began doing some kind of scan, then closed with the error "iTunes has enocountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconconvenience"
Firstly I figured I might have a corrupted file. So I deleted my iTunes library from my docs and opened iTunes again. It opened fine with no music in there. I added 1 single random file and it immediatley came up with the same error and closed.
Also Quicktime will no longer work, if I double click a Quicktime movie it opens, but when I click play it closes again.
I have done the following:
1) Fully scanned for viruses, spyware etc... my system is always well protected and nothing was found.
2) De-frag, disk scan, registry cleanup and even a roll back to 1 week ago when it worked (which didn't make it work!)
3) Completely removed iTunes & Quicktime, and related codecs and registry entries and re installed latest versions.
4) Completeley removed iTunes, Quicktime, and related codecs and registry entries and installed older versions.
5) Installed latest iTunes with an older Quicktime and vice versa.
6) Followed every single step in every related post on this board from people with the same issue.
Nothing at all works. Right now I have the latest Quicktime and iTunes installed fresh, with no music in my library. If I add even one song it crashes. Quicktime crashes as soon as you press play.
Every other media player on my system works fine and all of my music plays fine in Media Player.

Answer 1

I had a similar experience to you. After reading the various postings on the discussion board, I gave up trying to fix 7.0.1 (or later 7.0.2) and went back to 6.0.5.
I do not have a Nano, so I cannot tell you whether 6.0.5 will work with the Nano or not. However, it works relatively well with my 30 gig video iPod.
I do still have a few problems such as some podcasts (not all) cause the ipod to crash (but there is a manual fix for this problem - see this link for info: http://jimsrandomwalk.blogspot.com/2006/10/ipoditunes-update-is-flop.html)
My feeling on this is that the Apple engineers are not blind to the fact that there are problems. However, until the problems rise to the level of causing Apple some market problems, they don't have to worry about the small percentage of us who have these problems. I will not be buying any iTunes until this all gets worked out.
Good luck with resolving your problems.
See my earlier post on this thread for info on how to go back to an earlier version of iTUnes.