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My Apple Update software just notified me that iTunes 7.1 is now available. This release is supposed to address some problems with iTunes on Vista. Apple’s support doc lists these specifics:

Compatibility with Windows Vista

iTunes 7.1 addresses a number of known compatibility issues with Windows Vista. Apple is actively working with Microsoft to resolve a few remaining known issues, including:

• Ejecting an iPod from Windows Explorer or the Windows notification area (system tray) using the “Safely Remove Hardware” feature may corrupt your iPod. To always safely eject an iPod, choose Eject iPod from the Controls menu within iTunes. If your iPod becomes corrupt, selecting your iPod in iTunes and clicking Restore in the iPod’s Summary panel should return your iPod to a working condition.
• iTunes may display text or graphics incorrectly on your screen. Resizing the iTunes window should correct this issue.
• Contacts from Windows Contacts may not sync with iPod.
• iTunes remains unsupported on 64 bit editions of Windows, including Windows Vista and Windows XP x64.

Luckily, I am running a 32-bit verion of Vista on my AMD64 computer. I’ll try out iTunes 7.1 over the next week and post whether or not my experience with iTunes on Vista is any better than before.

Update: Not even five minutes after I post this, I experience a new redraw problem in iTunes. In the middle of updating my iPod, iTunes started drawing funny. So, I tried to resize the window, per the suggestion in Apple’s support document (see above). Instead of fixing the problem, that made it worse! The iTunes window disappeared, and I can’t call it back up! wtf!?

Update: A week later, iTunes 7.1 has not really solved any of the problems I was experiencing. My window will still screw up its graphics if left open for too long ("too long" being an arbitrary amount of time determined by some as yet undiscovered force elsewhere in the universe). To top it off, I am having trouble adding some tracks to my library. iTunes claims to process the tracks, and then it just doesn’t add them. AAAARGH!