itunes uninstall killed vista

[Version_3]

Last night was just freaky.

I went to re-activate my copy of vista since it deactivated due to hardware changes, and I found that it was already reactivated. Ok, weird, but cool. Next, I did updates. Did the usual song and dance of update, reboot, configure, reboot, configure, login. Cool. I decided to remove iTunes from vista because I want to put it onto another machine.

So I uninstalled it, then did the recommended reboot. Upon hitting the boot select menu (for vista or xp x64) and upon choosing vista, it tells me that winload.exe is missing.

I hate vista, and have no remorse about getting rid of it, but can I restore a backup copy of winload.exe from somewhere? Where in Vista would that somewhere be? Its a non-SP Vista Business edition.

[xxEIEIOxx]

You may try what is posted here http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=801428&SiteID=17 though I can't claim to have tried it, I haven't had this problem. I wouldn't necessarily blame Vista here, as I have seen many problems with Apple software on Vista (iTunes, Quicktime, Bonjour). All of my problems with Vista disappeared when I got rid of all of them.

[milkweg]

I had Acronis True Image do the same thing to me on Vista when I created a secure zone on my HDD with it. The fix is to put in your Vista disk and choose repair option. That fixed it for me anyway.

[Version_3]

I wouldn't necessarily blame Vista here, as I have seen many problems with Apple software on Vista.

Oh I know iTunes did it. "iTunes uninstall killed vista"


I also fixed the issue. From xp, I searched the vista drive and found old copies of winload in sxs folders. I grabbed the most recent one and slapped it into system32. Works now.

[Nenu]

I had the same problem with a clients PC when he wanted to get rid of it after his daughter installed it.
We found that uninstalling killed all internet, thats scary because it must form part of the route that all your traffic flows through!
We verified the issue by rolling back to before installing it, put it back on and uninstalled again, same problem.

The cure we had was to restore the sytem with System Restore to before when it was installed.
This was a year ago so the post above is better advice :)

[Cyrilix]

I have not tried to uninstall iTunes yet, but this is absolutely terrible. To think that a music playing application could cause that much damage is pretty scary.

[dreamer3kx]

itunes is the devil on a windows machine,