Gonna Kill My iTunes -- This ever happened to anyone else before?

Hi, people.

Okay, I'm just going to get to the point of this thread.

So, today, I'm on iTunes, right? Box pops up telling me I need to update to version 9.2 so I click 'Okay' and 'Install' and all that jazz; I wait a half hour for the thing to install and at the end--right before it would have finished, of course--it tells me my computer ran out of space. So, following the directions of the all-knowing gray box, I click 'cancel' on the download.

Things freeze up for a bit, and then run smoothly. I blow ten more dollars on a few songs. I go to update my iPod with the songs, and I can't see the little option that brings you to your iPod. I unplug and re-plug my iPod back in a few times, but nothing happens, just that annoying pling-plunk! type sound the computer makes when you plug something into a USB slot.

I figure to myself, "Okay, maybe iTunes is just being a pain." So I ex out of iTunes. When I go back and click on the icon, what does the gray box of doom tell me? Wonderful news:

iTunes is missing some files and cannot run. Please reinstall iTunes.

And when I try to go reinstall iTunes, it won't work. ]:

So, my main question; has this happened to you before? If so, were the songs that you downloaded (but forgot to back up...) still available if you singed back into your old iTunes Store account, under the Purchased tab?

Thank you for clickin',
-A very unhappy-with-technology-at-the-moment DL

Ohhh my gosh. Yeah, I can see why you said you hate iTunes.

It never happened to me before, at least with iTunes. Cus I had a similar situation with Sims 3 where I cancelled an update before it was finished, and then it wouldn't work, so I had to reinstall it all . . . painful. The downloaded stuff was still there, at least. XD And I know it has nothing to do with Apple, but still.

From what I understand, if you uninstall and reinstall iTunes, you'll still have all your music . . . the iTunes library itself shouldn't be affected, just the application. You can look that up online to verify if my uncertain word isn't enough, though, or make a copy of the whole file and hide it somewhere just to be sure it won't get deleted. (Though if your computer ran out of space, that may not work so well. xD)

And if you're about to die because nothing will work with so little space, there's two options. First of all, you can go find another website with the older versions of iTunes and download those; from what I understand, it was just trying to update it that caused the space issues, so the older version should work fine if you don't update and cancel again.

The other option is to just go and clear the computer out. I don't know if it's actually your computer, though, but if there's anything in the trash bin, at least emptying that can help.

I don't really understand (sorry, I've seen so many iTunes errors, they all blend together. They all mean the same thing. The darned thing is stupid and doesn't work. xD)
But I do underdstand the frustration. iTunes' gray boxes are the most stupidestestest things ever.
If the music is still on your iPod, I'd take a leap and uninstall iTunes, then do 'transfer purchases' on the re-installed most current version.

I don't know what to do about iTunes directly, but try following what other people have said. If you purchased the songs, then your account should be charged, and there should be some way to access the songs. And I think that when you buy a song on iTunes, it goes into a folder in your main 'Music' folder. I know that it does that on my Windows, but that's just me.