iTunes AND iTunes store album artwork missing!

[Vacado]

Hi all, I've been searching your forums and I haven't been able to find anyone else who is experiencing the same issues I am. Album artwork problems seem to be a dime a dozen, but mine must be unique! All my album artwork was working just fine in both iTunes and on my iPod, but today I noticed that the album artwork in iTunes is no longer displaying in the artwork viewer. A few of my albums still have their artwork, but the rest just show up (in the artwork viewer) as blank white boxes, some with thin black borders if their artwork was too small to fill the full artwork viewer.

When I tried the Cover Flow feature, the artwork that didn't disappear still shows up, some of the artwork that was not visible in the artwork viewer shows up in the Cover Flow window (still not in the artwork viewer), but most of it is just a big black square.

All of my artwork is still on my iPod (haven't synced it since this issue started), so this is clearly an iTunes issue...or so I thought! I decided to check the iTunes store, and noticed that ALL of the album artwork in the iTunes store also shows up as black squares! Why is all the album artwork not displaying? Since the artwork is all still on my iPod, is there a way to get it back into iTunes from there?

This is totally bizarre, and I am hoping someone here might have a suggestion for what is wrong. I am running Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron E1505, with iPod version 7.6.2.9. I have been running iTunes and my 30 GB iPod video on this machine since I purchased it all in July 2006, and have had no problems until now. The only things I have recently done to my computer were to run a full virus scan and a full Spybot scan - I did both of those yesterday morning (as a routine thing), and the virus scan came up completely clean, while the Spybot scan had the normal handful of tracking cookies and the like. I've restarted my computer at least half a dozen times, hoping that would fix it, but to no avail. I also disabled the "automatically download album artwork" feature, since I've read that this could be causing problems.

Thank you so much for your help! I'm really frustrated by all of this, and I'm afraid to sync my iPod to charge it because I don't want iTunes to erase all of the artwork that's on my iPod!

V

[Vacado]

My boyfriend has suggested that I uninstall and reinstall iTunes. Do you think this will work? He says he constantly has problems with iTunes and is having to uninstall and reinstall, but I am worried about losing my media if I do that.

I'm thinking of trying to do a System Restore, just to see if maybe that will help.

v

[Vacado]

ok, system restore didn't work. I guess I should try uninstalling and then reinstalling iTunes.

v