I’ve had this problem since the release of Vista and it seems pretty isolated so I wasn’t able to find a solution on the internet, but though a series of events and random chance I seem to have found a solution.

Symptom(s)

When you try to add, play (Video will play for about 6 seconds) or transfer .mov or .mp4 (mpeg-4) video files (even from the iTunes Music Store) one of three things will happen.

• iTunes gracefully crashes and Windows Vista continues to function
• Windows Vista completely hangs and ceases to function forcing a hard power-down.
• Windows Vista will crash resulting in a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) with the error KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR.

The same outcome can occur when trying to transfer a large amount of photos to an iPod using iTunes.

I am using an HP A1510N with the A8N-LA Nagami2 (nForce 430 (MCP51)) mother board. I also have an additional SATA and USB HardDrive, an additional 512MB RAM and a PCIe ATI Radeon x1950PRO, I believe this error may be hardware specific as this error doesn’t occur on my Dell notebook.

The Solution

I reformatted and reinstalled Windows Vista, without installing anything else, even Windows Updates, I installed iTunes, but the video problems (above) persisted. I then installed all of the Windows Updates (Including optional drivers except for a Realtek sound driver) and the latest driver for my graphics card, restarted my computer and iTunes could play, transfer and add video perfectly, except for a slight problem with audio sync. Reformatting may not be necessary, check to see if you have an update in Windows Update named NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller and install if it’s not already, restart and test your video files.

The key to the solution seems to be the NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller which seems to have been released yesterday. It would make sense if iTunes was trying to access a harddrive function that the driver/ couldn’t handle resulting in Windows Vista crashing because it suspected a damage Page File. Of course, I can be SURE that this was the fix. I will update this post if anything breaks later on because of a program incompatibility.