iTunes 8 Vista bug fixed

Apple may have taken the opportunity of an iPod range refresh to encourage people to update to iTunes 8, but it's not been all plain sailing – as users running Windows Vista have discovered.

iTunes 8 is considered by most to be an improvement on its predecessors - now that the Vista bug is fixed, anyway.

The latest build of the iTunes music library introduces the Genius Playlist, which aims to recommend songs from your collection based on their similarity to the current song. While this features isn't without its niggles, it's not the intelligence of the recommendation system that is causing heartache for iTunes fans – it's a rather basic instability when running Vista.

As reported by BetaNews, the web is a-twitter with reports that Apple's latest and greatest has an irritating tendency to crash hard when run under Windows Vista – as in, blue screen of death. The crash is exhibited when any iPod device is connected to a Windows Vista machine running the initial build of iTunes 8. It would appear that the latest iPod driver – GEARApsiWDM.sys, to be precise - bundled with the application isn't exactly Vista friendly.

Since the initial release, Apple has admitted the issue and released an updated copy of iTunes 8. If you're an early adopter who downloaded the original, buggy release Apple is recommending that you fully uninstall the original version before installing the update. Once you've done that, you should be able to plug your iPod in without fear that your system is about to have some unscheduled downtime.