Let me start this article by saying that I finally broke down last year and bought myself an mp3 player, specifically an iPod. I didn’t choose the iPod because it was trendy or hip or whatever, I chose it because for what it could do and the space it had, for the price, it was the best deal. Now, with an iPod you need to use iTunes (I realize there are other 3rd party tools out there, but call me a purist, I want to use it the way it was intended). In many ways, iTunes rocks, and in many ways, iTunes sucks. Whether you love it or hate it, you are pretty much stuck with it.

That being said, let me share with you a couple of errors I received recently, and what I did (finally) to make them go away. In my dealings with these errors, my searching on the Internet didn’t find any solution to the problem, although some information pointed me in the right direction. Ultimately, I spent enough time troubleshooting and testing (a.k.a banging my head against the wall) that I got the problem resolved, so I thought I would share, just in case anyone else runs across this issue. Judging from the number of posts I saw about it, lots of folk other than myself have had this come up too.

First, let me start with iTunes. Now, I actually used iTunes before I had an iPod, even on Windows, because I liked it on the Mac so much. It’s not as nice or solid on Windows as it is on a Mac, at least not in my humble opinion anyway. Nonetheless, I use it now because of the iPod. Well, one day it did what so many Windows apps do, it stopped working. Literally, one day it was fine, and the next day it wouldn’t start, and instead would simply display the oh so helpful error message:

"iTunes has encountered a problem and needs to close."

Wow, such detail and craftsmanship in that error message. I knew instantly what was wrong! That was sarcasm by the way. I started and restarted iTunes, then the computer and nothing changed. So I did what anyone running Windows does in this case, I un-installed and reinstalled iTunes, still to no avail. I tried all manner of incantations and serializations of install and un-install, and only install QuickTime, whatever I could think off. It’s interesting to note that at this point, while I was only working with QuickTime, I would get this error message when I tried to open QuickTime by itself, regardless of whether or not iTunes was installed:

"Buffer Overrun Detected"

There was more to it, something about the Visual C++ Runtime Library detected the buffer overrun, and it wasn’t safe to continue running the program, etc., but that was the main and important part. In case anyone doesn’t know, iTunes somehow, for some reason, relies on QuickTime pretty heavily, and if it’s not working right, iTunes won’t work right either.

Here is a summary of what I did that, in the end, seemed to fix the problem. I’ll spare you anymore of the gory details that ended in utter failure. Please note that I am simply sharing what I did to fix this problem, this is what worked for me. It may or may not work for you and I can’t be held responsible if you blow something up in the process of trying, just making that clear up front.

First, I un-installed iTunes and all related software. This included “Apple support for mobile devices”, “Apple software update”, and iTunes itself.

Second, once the above was done, I went to un-install QuickTime. Unfortunately, it didn’t un-install properly. In fact, it would go through all the motions, but at the end it would tell me a “Fatal error occurred”, and would leave QuickTime untouched. I ended up just going to the QuickTime directory and deleting the whole thing, and then running the un-installer which worked fine at that point. I don’t know why, I just know that it did.

Third, I emptied the Recycle Bin and rebooted the computer.

Fourth, I checked Windows Update and made sure I wasn’t missing any patches. Seems trivial, but it can make a difference. In this case, I think my problem was related to extraneous QuickTime files (see step five), but it’s good to stay up to date anyway.

Fifth, once the machine came back up. I opened up Windows Explorer and did a search on my C: drive for any files that had “quicktime” in the name. I actually found quite a few, some in System32, some in cache folders, some that were prefetch downloads, etc. I removed them all, so that I had no QuickTime files left on the drive.

Sixth, I emptied the Recycle Bin and rebooted the computer.

Seventh, I reinstalled QuickTime, only I used the standalone install, not QuickTime + iTunes. Why? Because QuickTime was my litmus test for iTunes. If QuickTime would start and run, so should iTunes. After all of the steps above, this time QuickTime started up as expected, and didn’t give me the dreaded “Buffer Overrun Detected” message.

Eighth, I reinstalled iTunes. I was fairly confident at this point that iTunes would work, and it did work after the install this time. Once I verified it worked, I let the Apple Software Update then go ahead and update both iTunes and QuickTime (why they needed updating I am not sure, I had downloaded the latest versions), and everything still worked after the update, and reboot even.

There you have it, that’s what I ran into, and what I did to overcome the problem. In the end, I think I had some quirky QuickTime files out there somewhere that something didn’t like, because that step of searching for and deleting anything named quicktime seemed to be the turning point in the whole endeavor. I hope that this can help you, if you run into any of the same problems!