Reasons to Hate iTunes Oct 25, 2010

This post has nothing to do with Jitbit Software or its products. It has nothing to do with entrepreneurship, startups or other topics I usually cover. This post was supposed to be a follow-up review of the awesome Joel's Business of Software 2010 conference in Boston, but instead of writing the review, I've spent a sleepless night trying to bring my wife's laptop back to life after she had upgraded iTunes 9 to 10.

I hate iTunes with all my heart. At least the Windows version. And don't get me wrong - I'm not a religious Apple hater, I'm quite contrary actually - a happy owner of an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad, even considering buying a Mac. But iTunes...

iTunes is a piece of crap. At least the Windows version.

Google is full of unanswered questions like "help, my network connectivity is gone after removing/installing iTunes 10", or "help, the network services are down after (un)installing Apple Mobile Device Support!", or "My DHCP has stopped working, help!"...

The reason is - iTunes installs it's own drivers at the network protocol layer, and sometimes fails to configure/remove them properly.

So, in case you face one or more of these symptoms:

• your network/internet connection is down after installing/removing iTunes
• DHCP, DNS and similar services cannot start (sometimes with the "dependency services or group failed to start" errors in the log), indicating that the TCP/IP protocol driver is not working
• you see weird error messages in the event log, like "afd.sys/tdi.sys/tdx.sys failed to load" or "tdi.sys is not a valid win32 application"
• similar

then try the following steps, that I spent hours to figure out:

1. Run "netsh int ip reset" from the elevated command prompt. Reboot.
2. Run "netsh winsock reset" from the elevated command prompt. Reboot.
3. If the above did not work, restart in the safe mode (w network) and try steps 1 and 2 again.
4. If it still does not work, run "sfc /scannow" from the elevated command prompt (this is the "System File Checker" tool that will restore the original "afd.sys" and "tdi.sys" and similar files) and then repeat the steps 1-2.