Just recently, I was talking with a friend from the church that I go to and she was telling me that iTunes for Windows was failing to start on her computer. This happened after Apple rolled out an update for that music management system which also works as a bridge to one’s iPhone or iPad.
What I suggested for her to do in this case was to use Windows Control Panel to uninstall the software, then to visit Apple’s Website to reinstall iTunes. She thought that she would lose her music library and other settings associated with the program but, after she reinstalled iTunes as I had suggested, the program worked properly and she had access to her music library.
Most software programs rely on many different library and support files for them to work properly and these are typically delivered as part of an installation or software-update routine. But all it takes is the main executable file or one of these files to be corrupted and not carrying expected data for the program to fail to start or to run abnormally and slowly. As well, an increasing amount of software is dependent on resources held by other programs for it to perform certain functions.
How could these files be corrupted especially after an update? They can be corrupted by glitches in an Internet or network connection as the file is drawn down from the download server. Similarly, a hard disk may be starting to “lose it” and carry corrupted data especially as it becomes more fragmented and full of different data and this happens more as an update procedure substitutes older runtime files for newer files which may be larger or loads extra runtime files.
But a complete uninstall and reinstall routine allows the program to reconstruct all of its files that it needs to work with and rebuild all of the data associated with its settings that affect how it runs.
In some cases, identifying a program that is failing to start or affecting other programs and performing a complete uninstall / reinstall routine on that program may fix these problems. As well, it can cause a program to run more smoothly and quickly.
