iTunes has been bugging me for a few days to upgrade to its latest version for Windows, 11.1.4. I had a few minutes this afternoon so I clicked the button.

Boy, did that cause a riot. I downloaded, clicked “run” and ran into lovely errors which told me the installation had failed and I’d have to retry; “MSVCR80.dll is missing from your computer.”

Well, after about three tries I got annoyed and wrote a small note to Apple on its iTunes contact page. I also wrote a note in my Facebook status. Guess which got results faster?

My friend Patti said she’d seen something about that in one of her friends’ Facebook statuses. She went back and looked and found her friend Kitty. I wasn’t a Facebook “friend” of Kitty’s, so of course I couldn’t read her status; I had to send her a blind friend request. Fortunately she agreed and once that was done she pointed me to a page in the Apple Support Communities which explained how to fix the problem.

It worked! Uninstall various Apple programs in a certain order, download iTunes again, run (be sure you’re signed in as Administrator on the computer!), and you should be okay.