A possible fix for an iTunes 4.8 error 400
Jun 20, '05 08:11:00AM
Contributed by: jasont
If you recently upgraded iTunes, you may have problems authenticating, viewing your cart, or shopping. There are two errors which have been occuring recently. The first seems to be 502, I believe, and this appears to be resolved: If you cannot connect to the store and do not receive a 400 error, then it has been suggested that clicking the home icon repeatedly may solve this problem.
The second error is that some Cookies from apple.com with names that start with s_vi_ cause iTunes to produce error 400. Back up your cookies file (~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist), launch Safari, and delete all the s_vi_ cookies. This worked for me, but you may need to remove all apple.com cookies (including any prefaced with a word like login.apple.com) or remove all of your cookies. Unfortunately, this means you have to login to any area of Apple's site you visit frequently and plug-in or keychain your password (what I'm trying to avoid). Read on for a more detailed version of these instructions.
Long Version:
- Quit Safari and iTunes.
- Make a new folder on your desktop and name it backup cookies.
- Navigate to ~/Library/Cookies/ and copy Cookies.plist to the folder you created in step two
- Launch Safari.
- Select Safari -> Preferences -> Security, and click Show Cookies.
- Enlarge the window and scroll down until you see the cookies from apple.com that start with s_vi.
- Click on the first s_vi cookie, release the mouse, scroll to the last one, hold down Shift, and click and release on the last one. (If your cookies are not sorted so that all the s_vi cookies from Apple are contiguous, then you'll have to delete them individually).
- Select Remove not Remove All, click Done, quit Safari.
- Launch iTunes and login to your account. This should work now; it works for me.
I'm trying to isolate which specific cookies cause the problem. I'm going with characteristics. So far I have: name length, expires date, expires time, and contents as possible culprits. Splitting them for debugging isn't the easiest, since I have quite a lot of them. Any suggestions are welcome and if someone only has a few s_vi's, then finding the problem one there (if it's not all of those) would be great.
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Mac OS X Hints
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