Tens of thousands are tens of thousands. Don't try to skew the data, ten thousand people is a lot. There is no room to be relative there. People buy a product and expect it to work. Not just that, there are probably much fewer than "tens of millions" using the iTunes software. So ten thousand would be a big number, even in relative terms.

The issue presented here isn't microsoft, its Apple. its about apple's iTunes product being sub-standard quality. And thats that.

I like how you justify malware/bloatware/bad stewardship of client machines. "But we say you need it" does not defeat the fact that it's malware.

And tens of thousands of users having the same problem (and having it be reducible in 2 or 3 days to a repeatable problem) means that there was little to no testing done. Part of testing is USING the myriad environments of the ecosphere in which your application will exist. It would be like writing a web phone app that only works at 120 x 160 but crashes at 128x128. Sure, it doesn't crash on EVERY phone, but it crashes on a significant number of them.

(It's unclear to me, by the way, that your claim that only a few systems crash is true. I'm able to reproduce the error bug by doing a clean install of iTunes 8. It seems like the problem is much larger than you want it to be. But even if I concede your point that it's smaller than everyone, it's still large enough that we're seeing 'software malpractice')

And Microsoft got hip to how bad the "but there's lots of systems, wahhhhh" excuse is. Welcome to the 21st century. Apple should get hip to how lame that excuse is, too.

So buggy software is now 'malware'? That seems slightly harsh.