eEye Digital Security

This may be a bit of a petty thing, but the firewall or something in Blink 4.1 under Vista is blocking me from accessing the iTunes Store and is making it a royal pain to try and update podcasts (and what's a week in podcasting without hearing John C. Dvorak rant on TWiT?).  I've narrowed it down to Blink or one of it's components because when the Blink application itself is disabled I can access iTunes fine, however with the application active, generally with any of the System Protection, Intrustion Prevention and Firewall modules in varied combinations of enabled/disabled gives varied results.

I would recommend placing Blink's firewall in "Passive Mode" and then attempt to access iTunes Store.  If there needs to be any new rules created to allow it to function properly, you will see them logged in Blink's log.  Anything that was logged you would use to create new rules and then you would turn the Passive Mode function off afterwards.  See if this helps you. :) 

 Thanks for the tip.  The quick fix I did find in the meantime is adding the ituneshelper.exe process to the rules manually, however that only worked for about an hour.  May try again but for now I rolled back to 4.0.4.

How many podcasts are you downloading....? in an average download session?

Tons of big files?

Also try disabling the System Protection and Intrusion protection modules - if that does not work - turn them both back on and disable the AV module (please make sure not to be downloading email at the same time (Good way to get infected) but then see if acces sis restored..

I have worked heavily with Eeye with itunes issues so list them here - they have been quick to fix them up...

Also are you storing all your downloaded files locally or on a Network storage?

And last - is it just the store that is not coming up or is it timing out on the downloads?

In an average session I download about four or five podcasts, three of which are generally about 100MB+ (video) with all other podcasts being no more than 42MB, all files being stored locally.

I had fiddled with all modules in 4.1 in varying combinations to see what was causing the error (something like 'verify your network connection and try again') and it commonly was corrected if I disabled combinations of System Protection, Intrusion Prevention and Firewall, if only temporarily.  The issue blocks out the store entirely and is an intermittent issue with podcasts and other downloads.

So it is blocking the itunes store all the time?

As in you tap the Itunes store link and its not working..

 What version of Itunes? 8?

I have used both 7.7 and 8, both of these bringing up the error when I try to open the iTunes Store, or in the case of 7.7 the ministore.  As I had mentioned, it is also an intermittent issue with podcast downloads, though it only flags a small number of the downloads at a time.