iTunes + Win2000 = Angry Hateful Christmas Day!

I got Mrs Cleek an iPod Nano for Christmas - and wow are they cool looking. Today I tried to set it up on her PC. I installed iTunes; iTunes asked if we wanted to reboot to finsih the install process; I said Yes.

Windows never came back up. I unplugged the iPod and tried again. Nothing. I unplugged everything non-essential (leaving keyboard, mouse and monitor), and tried again. Nothing. I tried booting to the "Last Known Good" configuration. Nothing. Tried booting to Safe Mode. Nothing. I searched the web to see if this had happened to anyone else. It has. It's quite common, actually, and has been a problem with iTunes and Win2K since at least 2003.

I called Apple to see if they had a fix. Fifteen minute wait. The first girl had never heard of the problem and gave me to someone else who had heard of the problem and who cheerfully suggested I re-install Windows 2000. I declined.

A little more Googling turned up this, which suggests a conflict in Win2K between Adaptec's Easy CD Creator v4 (which was installed) and iTunes. Solution: unplug the CD-RW drive, reboot, uninstall iTunes and/or Adaptec. That will let me boot again. Now to see if I can boot after reinstalling iTunes and reconnecting the CD-RW drive.

...

I can.

Joy!