Dug out my old iPod classic a while ago, and hooked it up to my very old music centre. All fine until I wanted to mke some changes, but the newest version of iTunes (11 I think) won't recognise my iPod.
I uninstalled iTunes, downloaded iTunes 10 and now iTunes won't run at all. I'm getting a Windows error and also a missing dll file error, which keeps changing. icuin40.dll was one.
Here's an example: 'The procedure entry point JSContextGetGlobalObject could not be located in the dynamic link library Webkit.dll
Error 7 Windows error 127

I've run 'Repair' uninstalled, reinstalled, still nothing. Now I'm worse off than I was before, at least iTunes used to play on my laptop. All my music CD's were copied to the computer and various external hard drives a long time ago, and I don't have a CD player any more. (The CD player in the music centre doesn't work, can't open the tray. And it doesn't have that useful little hole where you could stick a paper clip to open it.)

Naturally, to go with all this old equipment, I'm running Windows 7. Can't afford to upgrade anything.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I've searched online, rejected various helpful sites where I can download PC repair help to give me my missing dll file and a few malware additions, also taken on board suggestions from the Apple Community, but no luck so far.

12.10.11.2 is the latest version of iTunes for Windows 7. Before proceeding further, ensure that you have it installed.

I would advise against installing older versions of iTunes. However, for Windows 7, iTunes version 9.0.2 seems to have been the earliest version available; so, after trying the latest (12.10.11.2), you could attempt to install that version.

I have not used an iPod (nor iTunes) since the late 2000s, on Windows Vista; so, please forgive the potentially unhelpful advice.

Thank you very much for helping. I had the latest version installed, but then found that it no longer recognizes the old iPods, which is why I went looking for an earlier version. I tried version 9, but no luck, so I then uninstalled that and tried version 10, still nothing.
I do have a lot of music on the iPod, so perhaps I should just give up on it, keep it connected to the music centre (which has good speakers) and then put all my other music from the computer into my phone. I only really used iTunes for the old iPod, it was a good piece of hardware. I hear you. Although I do like my old iPod. It's the only apple product I have. I mostly stay off social media also, trying not to enrich those who don't need it. Stupid thought, everything I do enriches someone who doesn't need it, I fear.

I live in the most unequal country in the world (South Africa), so I do my best to be kind and tread lightly. fwiw

Fun fun. yeah tread lightly. I heard south africa things were going sideways a few years ago. But that's unrelated to the topic at hand.

Out of curiosity how big is the iPod you have? I remember it effectively being a hard drive with a funky interface on front, so it may be like 20Gb drive. Not that it matters too much.

You may want to give Anapod Explorer a try. My mate used to use it extensively as an alternative to iTunes when he was backing up his entire audio CD collection to his 120 GB iPod Classic back in the day. To stop iTunes/Apple constantly erasing the iPod on each consecutive connection to his computer, because the contents of each did not match, as he was deleting the ripped tunes from his PC after each back up...

Yeah, syncing... Quite the annoyance with the iPod as i remember. It was also in the days when they were pushing DRM for audio, which was fought back so well that music is basically DRM-free at this moment.

It's 160Gb, a decent size for music files. And that interface works well to select, sort and do all sorts of useful things. Probably not as smooth as the latest iPhone, but much more my style. Throwing out perfectly workable old stuff just to show off with lots of new bling doesn't sit well with me at all.
And it's also pretty reliable. I have junked several external HDD's that just got tired of working. So far my iPod is still going.

Thank you very much for the suggestion. And fwiw, there is a setting in iTunes Preferences to turn off that automatic synching, but you won't know unless you are looking for it. Not much use after the fact.
I checked out Anapod, and it sounded perfect, so I downloaded and installed it. Just one problem, it won't run. I've been struggling with it for most of the day, turning my virus checker and firewall and other security stuff off and on, but nothing. I sent a message to my security software support, but I would have expected at least some kind of mention if that program had been blocked.
I also noticed that Anapod has been discontinued and is no longer supported, but it still installed with no problem.

But that got me to thinking about other iTunes alternatives, which I'm looking into.
So far I've found a decent music player - MusicBee, which read all my iTunes files, even copied in the tags - but won't look at the iPod, for this reason: "Due to Apple's proprietary software, most iPods, iPhones and iPads are not supported by MusicBee"
I've also found another program that specializes in copying files and music to iPods and back, going to give that a try.

I'm also hamstrung by our electricity problems, daily blackouts - euphemistically called 'load-shedding' - sometimes we are told about them, up to 4 hours at a time, often 2 or 3 times a day, but other times they just happen and those can be 24hrs or more. Many people here have invested in generators and solar power, others have invested in usb-powered devices and lights, not to mention little camping stoves. Strange how we've regressed, soon we'll all be going to bed by candle light.

Yes, that was fun, jumping through hoops trying to burn backup copies of CD's and DVD's you'd legally purchased. No wonder the pirates did so well at the time. I lived in Portugal in those days, and pirated versions of everything were freely available.

Which is overkill. Typical bitrate is 128kbit which is about 1Mb per minute of CDish quality audio. You can easily double it and have very good 256kbit music. Raw audio was 10Mb/minute so you're still storing a lot.

So a little math

160*1000 = 160,000 minutes (111 days continuous playing without repeats), at ~3 minutes a song 53,333 songs...

They were certainly trying to keep you from being able to copy/backup your stuff. The MPAA and MIAA bullying Microsoft to make it harder to rip discs, naturally security flaws up the whazoo but a cracked driver for the CD/DVD and they gotta push an immediate mandatory patch to lock that part out...

I wouldn't call it piracy though, that's an appropriated word. Actual piracy still happens out in the ocean seas. And comparing downloading a series of 0's and 1's on the same level as attacking someone while out to sea and stealing their stuff, is not remotely the same (and a grey keyseller selling keys from stolen credit cards is closer since it directly harms all parties except the thief). That and copyright needs a major overhaul. Copyright was intended to 'encourage the creation of sciences and creative works', granting exclusive rights to said works for 'a limited time', which used to be something on par with 16 years. Companies and corporations instead see copyright as 'owning something forever' and wanting to milk it forever too.

But like we've seen with Fox, they had Fantasic four, didn't do anything, about to lose their rights to use it and so shoved out crappy versions of the fantastic four just to keep it. They'd rather lose millions (or billions) to maintain ownership of something rather than let it go in the public domain. And because of the logic of 'own it forever' they don't try to preserve source code, or put it aside for when it would go public domain, so some games have to be re-written completely from scratch, or in some cases with debug builds, decompile it without the comments and other materials (diablo and Mario64 comer to mind). Also after the first year all major sales of games are done, and within 4 years books (and discs) are no longer in print and they are just selling stock they have.

iTunes dropped support for older iPods a long time ago (in fact, no iPod at all is supported by Apple nowadays). You'll be better off with an alternative program like Foobar or something like that. Just google "alternatives to iTunes for original iPod" and you'll find a lot of options.

I've forgotten the trick of posting without just copying in all of the response. I tried, but Gog hung on me, so I'll just go back to the easy way, sorry.

What a great post, I wish I could do that! Seriously. I can see where my wasted life has gone, and I don't mind a bit. ;-)
But remember classical music takes up a lot more space for fewer 'songs', and I'm a classical and jazz fanatic and I like most kinds of music. My music files are backed up onto a 4Tb HDD, which is almost full (without duplicates), and I still have a lot of CD's and vinyl not yet digitized. I would have liked an iPod with a lot more space, but instead they dumped it altogether.

All very true. Copyright is a really screwed-up mess, the people who should benefit from it don't, and it just seems to cause a whole lot of problems, even now. Not to mention that there is no agreement world-wide that applies, so everything seems to depend on where you live.
I was associated with an architectural practice in Portugal that won a copyright case against a developer who took our plans and built his own version of the design, without paying or getting copyright permission. I'm still surprised that we won that one.

Thank you very much for the help. I'm downloading and trying out a few, including Foobar, trying to find one that can cope with all my files, is free, and can read and write to the iPod.

Oh, I've got this. Throw iTunes out the window. You can do so much better by Cider.

*Sidenote, Darvond is not a member of the bourgeois, and therefore has never owned an Apple product in his life.

**If it works on Windows 7 or not, how should I know, I'm not about to look that up for a nearly 15 year old OS.