An Infuriating Problem - Part 1

It's with an iPhone (if you aren't interested, I don't blame you).

The problem is that, after an upgrade to the most recent version of iTunes, I can no longer sync my iPhone and one of my iPods. When I connect the iPhone to the computer, iTunes reports that it is "Verifying Mark McFadden's iPhone" and then iTunes freezes and nothing happens.

Remarkably, the same thing happens with my iPod classic 120Gb.

Looking online I discovered I wasn't alone. One solution was to deauthorize the iTunes program and restore the iPhone on another computer. Tried that. Same problem.

Another possibility was to do a clean installation of iTunes on the machine that I was trying to sync with. Tried that. Same problem.

I took the iPhone to a completely different machine and restored it to its facotry defaults. Then I reunited it with the machine running iTunes. Basically, I tired to have iTunes pretend that it was a brand new iPhone. Tried that. Same problem.

I actually called Apple technical support where a nice lady called Amanda -- I suspect that all the Apple Technical Support people are named Amanda -- suggested that I uninstall everything I have from Apple and do a complete reinstallation. Even though it broke my copy of MobileMe and left me without iTunes, I did it. Tried that. Same problem.

So Amanda suggested that I completely delete iTunes and all Apple products from my machine and erase my copy of my media library (180Gbytes of media). I really wanted the iPhone to sync and, even though it seemed the option of last resort, I went ahead and did it. Tried that too. Same problem.

The amazing thing is that -- what should have happened -- apparently didn't. I got the machine to a state where there was no Apple software on it and no media of any kind. The "iTunes" folder was completely deleted. And, when I reinstalled iTunes it still didn't work. I can take a blank restored iPhone to a machine that is running a fresh copy of iTunes and still get the same problems.

Amanda and Apple haven't helped.

I'll reflect on this further as I try Apple again.