Why Is iTunes 8 Giving Vista Users A BSOD?

I guess Apple forgot that not everyone uses a Mac.

Vista users got a nasty surprise when they went to upgrade to iTunes 8: a Blue Screen of Death, aka a BSOD. Say what you want about Windows, but I haven’t seen BSODs on my home machines since the early days of XP.

What’s Causing the BSOD?

You can follow this thread on this Apple forum to read the growing list of posts written by increasingly frustrated users. At one point, an Apple rep “Roy B” jumped in to offer assistance, but his questions clearly show that the issue caught Apple completely off guard:

Hello all,

If you are experiencing this BSOD when you have an iPod connected with iTunes 8 installed, please follow these steps and email me <royb@apple.com> with your answers:

    * Look in the Programs and Feature Control Panel. Do you have Logitech Setpoint software installed?
    * If so, what version is it? (To see version info in Programs and Features, right-click the column header, choose More, and put a tick mark by Version)
    * Does the issue go away if you remove the Logitech software and reboot the computer?

After his initial question originally posted on 9-9-08, neither he nor any other Apple representative has made an appearance in the thread. Instead, the posters in the thread have been trying to help each other out. The latest workaround they’ve discovered seems to be unplugging any HP Printers you have installed. That fixes the issue for many people, but not all.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott looks at the issue in more detail, and determines that:

STOP errors can only be caused by kernel-level drivers or system services. A poorly written program can crash itself but not the entire system. So how can a supposedly simple software update cause a fatal crash?

Maybe because this isn’t a simple software update. Once again, Apple is using its automatic update process to deliver massive amounts of new software to users, including a device driver that has a long and checkered history of causing the Blue Screen Of Death to appear. And it’s delivering this massive payload without even a pretense of proper disclosure and without asking consent from its users.

He goes on to test his system and his tests reveal that the driver GEARAspiWDM.sys is the culprit. Apparently, this driver is known for causing BSODs, which begs the question, why on earth would Apple push this driver to Windows machines?

Where’s the QA? 

One of the posters on the thread wonders, “…there’s not a single person in Apple’s QA dept with an HP printer and Vista?” Another scoffs,  “Apple needs to “invest more in QA and less in these events..”

It seems like Apple is learning the hard way that when you gain market share and popularity, you also gain a much wider user base..and when that’s the case, you’re dealing with thousands of systems running software and hardware configurations in a million different ways.

But the real question here is where’s Apple QA department on all this? Did they drop the ball or is this the kind of error that could have happened to anyone?

More importantly, where is the “official” response from the company? Perhaps, like with MobileMe, they’re going to wait until the situation gets really bad before they speak up.

On a personal note, I’m irritated that Apple is still auto-selecting Safari for me every time there’s an update. I don’t want Safari and it should not be checked by default. Or if it is, I should be able to tell it “no” one time and have it stop nagging me.

Sigh. At least this update will include an opportunity to uninstall MobileMe. Again, I’m not thrilled that they pushed MobileMe down to machine without my consent. An extra icon in my Control Panel for a service I never asked for nor use? Why is it again that Apple gets to have such a great reputation? They are just downright sneaky. If Microsoft pulled this kind of stuff, they would be accused of “bundling,” but Apple does it and everyone makes excuses for them.