Tech Support: Why Do You Hate Me, O Itunes?

I got a Dell Inspiron 6400 as a graduation present/fine we'll replace your five-year old laptop last February. It is running Vista Basic, which is Microsoft's way of trying to drive itself out of business. It came on the computer. My engineer brothers didn't remove it and keep XP. I don't know why.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. My question to all you techies (if there are some of you, I know that there are at least some IP profs reading this, and you are tech savvy)--WHY DOES ITUNES HATE ME?!

I am running Itunes 7.2 right now. Itunes 7.5 is out. Why haven't I upgraded? BECAUSE ITUNES WON'T LET ME.

For some reason there's an error every time it gets to the last phase of installing Quicktime. As you know, it's bundled software, so I can't opt out of Quicktime and only install Itunes--the only thing I want anyway! And the whole entire apparatus shuts down, andI can't upgrade.

Thus, I can't download Itunes Plus music. Doing the lawful thing is technically impossible. Well, I suppose I could always buy physical CDs--but the digital files are cheaper! If Itunes drives me to violate copyright law, you heard it here, readers--it is not my fault.

My computer is up-to-date--no service packs to be installed, updates, etc. For some reason, teh package is not installing. Do any of you Vista users out there (oh, wretched are e) have similar problems trying to upgrade Itunes and any suggestions?

If nothing works, then come Thanksgiving I will have my brother uninstall my entire operating system so that I can go back to XP and Office 97-2003. Office 2007 looks nifty, but I had 97-2003 down pat memorized and customized, and I have to "save as" 97-2003 anyway whenever I share files--which I do a lot in my graduate seminars, since we have to share work.

Any help would be appreciated.