I downloaded IE8 beta onto my Vista PC recently, more fool me, and it messed it up a bit. I couldn’t install iTunes 8 onto it as the root registry permissions were non-existent. I tried setting them up again but with no luck. I tried various restores and repairs to the O/S but nope it wasn’t getting any better. So I gave up, copied my docs folder to the XP PC, accepted that WoW was going to get lost and ran the HP restore disks which took the PC back to the state it was in when I bought it in January 2007.

Installed Office 2003, Dreamweaver, Photoshop CS3, Skype and a bunch of other stuff and then tried Windows Update. That found 60 odd upgrades which I let it install and which of course failed. Rebooted and had another go but with only 20 odd upgrades which appeared to work. Rebooted and let it try and install all of the remaining upgrades (Don’t you ever learn? Ed). They downloaded and tried to install. The PC reboots itself to apply the upgrades to the registry and lord knows what else. Of course it doesn’t actually ever finish updating the system and so doesn’t actually reboot, just sits there in a sulk. Hard reboot time again. I can see I’m going to have install all of these upgrades one at a time. I wonder if people have these problems at Microsoft sites when they are upgrading or are they like all corporate sites so well locked down that they never encounter these horrible issues. Probably. It’s just us poor schmucks at home that have to go through these painful problems.

I then had a go at installing WoW. Got the basic install on and tried to login so that it could apply a year’s patches. Predictably there was a problem with downloading or installing the patches which looked a bit familiar. Hopefully I may have written a blog entry here somewhere so I can dig myself out of this problem. Then I can have a go at installing The Burning Crusade.

Or maybe I don’t bother with WoW and get Warhammer instead.

On my Vista PC I have iTunes installed with no music on it and it obviously, doesn’t sync with any kinda iThingy. It’s there just so that I can use the Vista PC to see what new iPhone apps and stuff I could possibly download using my syncable XP PC.

In the last couple of days every time I click on the iTunes icon, it tries to install itself. Odd, as it was already installed and this was before the iTunes 8 upgrade. I tried a Google search and found a page that said to check my registry for permissions, which I did, and they were truly scuppered. Then it suggested to download something called subinacl and run that. After checking that, though it was compatible with everything apart from Vista, it apparently did work with Vista. So I ran that, which by itself wasn’t going to cure squat. Then there was some stuff to stick on a .bat file and to be run, which jettisoned itself towards the registry. Took my life in my hands and unleashed the beast, which didn’t do much.

I fiddled with the the permissions to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT myself, which until then had said something along the lines of no one’s got access and somehow managed to get ‘Everyone’ some kind of acces. Rebooted a couple of times and I still have a problem with iTunes. Did some more googling and found some hints that it it was something to do with the Windows Installer, and which I have had problems with before. I checked the Windows Installer service in Services and it hadn’t started and didn’t want to start. This is turning into a great big ‘hmmmm…’ moment. No doubt with a great amount of research tomorrow I will sort this out, but neverthess…..

Let’s back up a little. When did iTunes start to want to install itself rather than just run? Several days ago. What happened several days ago? I installed Internet Explorer version 8. Connected? Nah, shudder the thought.