iTunes 9 - too much to manage

iTunes has encountered a problem and needs to close.  We are sorry for the inconvenience.
Too bloody right.

I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to the iOS4 operating system in the week of 23rd June, shortly after the update became available through iTunes.  The download and sync failed, and I ended up with a phone that couldn't make calls, load software, or anything else.  I tried uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes - no use, then uninstalling and reinstalling all of the Apple components on my PC - again no use, and finally, under the guidance of the help line, creating a new user account and uninstalling and reinstalling everything.  At last, I was able to make the update (even though that failed a couple of times).  Every uninstall/reinstall is a long process, including restarting the PC and a couple of hours a time is not too far of the mark.

Unfortunately, to get my phone back to my own user account and user name, I had to reset it to factory settings and so I will have lost some content - photos.  Very annoying, but at least the phone was back in action.

The real irritation now is that iTunes falls over while syncing music and/or podcasts.  I'm losing content because it stops downloading podcasts that I haven't listened to for a while - the reason I haven't listened is because I can't get them onto the iPhone.

The process suggested on the web site to fix this is too time consuming to be bearable, but it was failing tonight on file 4 of 220 that it meant to sync.  The file was downloaded at about 22:30 this evening. I have a few thousand files that may or may not be the cause of the issue.  Or not at all.

iTunes is now such a complicated set of software that if anything goes wrong, there's no way to fix it.  Now I daren't buy that lovely iPad because I may not be able to sync it.  Shame.