So, I get home from work today only to find that iTunes on my windows machine would not start up. I kept getting the message that CoreGraphics.dll was missing and that I should re-install iTunes. I really don’t know HOW this could have happened as I have not installed/uninstalled anything on here.
I searched around online for awhile and saw the typical suggestions of uninstalling and reinstalling and so I did just that. I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes and the issue existed. So I did a full blown search in my C:\ and sure enough CoreGraphics.dll was sitting in “C:\Program Files(x86)\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support\”. No where else was it found.
I then decided to poke around inside the iTunes64Setup.exe install file. Luckily, WinRAR was able to extract the setup which presented me with several Apple install files.
- AppleApplicationSupport.msi
- AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi
- AppleSoftwareUpdate.msi
- Bonjour64.msi
- iTunes64.msi
- MobileMe.msi
- QuickTime.msi
- SetupAdmin.exe
Using msiexec I was able to extract the files within the msi install files (all except for the SetupAdmin.exe of course):
msiexec /a FileName.msi /qb TARGETDIR=PathToWhereYouWantTheFilesExtracted
Since I had everything extracted in their own folders, from there I did a full blown search to see where all the CoreGraphics.dll’s were located. I was under the hunch that we were NOT going to find CoreGraphics.dll within the iTunes install itself considering where I found it on my system. Sure enough, I only found 1 instance of CoreGraphics.dll and it was within the install of AppleApplicationSupport.msi.
I have been unable to figure out WHY iTunes would be shipped without certain key dll’s when it, apparently, won’t run without them. However, by reinstalling AppleApplicationSupport.msi I was able to get iTunes working again.
While I’m not 100% this will fix everyone’s issue with a missing CoreGraphics.dll, I would at least suggest trying to uninstall NOT iTunes but AppleApplicationSupport and reinstalling that install directly. Hope this helps some people.