Posted on Friday, September 12 2008 @ 23:27 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Tech Report
writes Apple's the first public version of iTunes 8 installed crash-prone drivers on Windows systems which may result in the infamous BSOD:
Bott says iTunes 8 installs not only QuickTime, but also Apple Mobile Device Support, MobileMe, and two driver updates. One of those drivers—a USB controller update—reportedly identifies itself in many users' blue-screen error messages. The other—GEARAspiWDM.sys—has "a long and colorful history of causing Windows crashes," according to Bott.
This driver [GEARAspiWDM.sys] is typically used with third-party programs that write to CD and DVD drives. The old iTunes versions of this driver is dated January 29, 2008. The new one is from April 17, 2008. . . . I remember dealing with it back in Windows 2000 days. And sure enough, a search for GEARAspiWDM.sys BSOD turns up thousands of hits. I’ve also found anecdotal reports of this driver causing iTunes to crash, including this one from the Gear Software forum last May.
So, are the drivers really causing widespread problems? Bott claims to have fallen victim to a GEARAspiWDM.sys-induced system lockup himself after plugging in an iPod. Replacing the file with an older version put a stop to the crashes.
Fortunately Apple
already released an update which solves the problem.
