Apple tries to stop crashing Vista PCsApple has done some backtracking to stop "blue screens" after another "sneaky" software update

Apple has now published a fix for Windows Vista users whose machines crashed following one of its arguably deceptive software updates.On Wednesday, Ed Bott provided inside look at Apple's sneaky iTunes 8 upgrade, which "promises an update to iTunes+QuickTime and says nothing about any other software". And there's around 80 megabytes of it. Bott says:The download consists of five installer packages and a master setup program. In addition to iTunes and QuickTime, the package includes the Bonjour service (which has been a part of iTunes for a long time), plus Apple Mobile Device Support and MobileMe.But in addition to all that software, Apple is also sneaking a couple of driver updates onto the system. One is a USB controller update, which is apparently used when connecting an iPod or iPhone to the system.In addition to this driver, the system also updates the GEARAspiWDM.sys driver (in Windows\System32\Drivers). I had to dig deep to discover this change, which is not documented anywhere. This driver 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. This driver has a long and colorful history of causing Windows crashes. I remember dealing with it back in Windows 2000 days.