I was just happy as a clam until a couple of weeks ago when my iTunes told me "There is a new version of iTunes. Would you like to download it?" Dunce that I am, I replied yes.
iTunes is bundled with QuickTime, and as you may or may not know, the latest version of QuickTime (version 7.0.3) from Apple is fairly incompatible with Windows 2003 Server. Ordinarily, I could give less than a fuck, but iTunes requires QuickTime to run. The only reason I
EVER use iTunes is to put music onto my iPods, and since iTunes was to ONLY thing that I could use, you can imagine how pissed I was.
After doing a little research, I came across several threads like
this one in the Apple support forums. It seems that one of the Security patches (
KB908531) for Windows Server 2003 issued by Microsoft, creates a situation where parts of QuickTime's normal operation (including install) are now
"privileged instructions".
You could uninstall this security patch and the latest versions of QuickTime and iTunes will work just fine. The problems with this are that 1) you leave your Windows 2003 Server vulnerable to attack, and 2) If you have your Windows Update set to automatically download, you will be consatntly downloading and re-installing this security patch.
The latest version of QuickTime claims to have corrected a vulnerability as well. Personally I would rather go with a secure Windows server and a vulnerable older version of QuickTime, so that's what I did.
So here's how to clean and revert QuickTime.
First, let's get down to the uninstall. Since the latest version of QuickTime fouls up the install, it fails to make the registry entries that would allow the uninstall to show up in Add/Remove Programs. OK, so then what? You could try using the Start Menu item to uninstall QuickTime (Start -> All Programs -> QuickTime -> Uninstall QuickTime). For the same reason (the catastrophic failure during install), it fails to make registry entries that would allow the InstallShield kernel to run the MSI package which would uninstall QuickTime.
Download the
Windows Installer CleanUp Utility from Microsoft. This will find the MSI installer package and allow you to uninstall its contents fairly quietly.
It may still leave the files in place so be sure to delete those files manualy. Usually they are stored in C:\Program Files\QuickTime
Here is the step that is really important and must be done before proceeding any further. Open your system folder (usually C:\Windows\system32) and find 2 files, QuickTime.qts and QuickTimeVR.qtx. You must delete these files. They are Apple extensions for QuickTime that function like DLLs. Any QuickTime installer will search for the existence of these files and read the version information out of these files. Don't believe me? Run a
file monitor during the install process.
OK, so now you have successfully cleaned off QuickTime. If you inadvertently uninstalled iTunes, you must install the latest version of iTunes (which will attempt to reinstall the latest version of QuickTime) and repeat the process.
QuickTime 7.0.1 Reinstaller (link no longer available)So now you should have the latest version of iTunes and the not so latest version of QuickTime.
Labels: iPod, iTunes, Technology