Apple has released iTunes 7.7.1 with criminally terse release notes saying that it includes "fixes to improve stability and performance." As a result, it's nearly impossible to figure out what has changed, although some trawling through Apple's discussion forums yielded additional information. Two of the bug fixes below were noted by an pseudonymous Apple employee, which gives them a certain imprimatur, but for the rest, the best we can do is to offer user reports that have only anecdotal support.

• A comment from Apple employee "iTunes Mike" states that iTunes 7.7.1 fixes the bug that caused accented characters in artist and track names to be corrupted (see "iTunes 7.7 Corrupts Accented Artist and Track Names," 2008-07-24). That post also confirms that the bug affected only versions of Mac OS X prior to Leopard, and only MP3 files (not AAC or Lossless).
• Another post from iTunes Mike indicates that iTunes 7.7.1 should also fix a bug that prevented audio CDs from being ejected while iTunes was running.
• Other users report that iTunes 7.7.1 appears to solve a problem that prevented attached iPods from being recognized quickly; some claimed that it was taking many minutes (reports ranged from 4 minutes to over 40 minutes) for iTunes to realize that an iPod was connected.
• At least some people are reporting that iPhone backups that were taking an extremely long time (many hours) are now faster, although it's unclear as yet if the problem has been solved entirely, or for all users.
• On the Windows side, iTunes 7.7.1 appears to fix a problem syncing information from Outlook with the iPhone.

iTunes 7.7.1 is a 48 MB download available via Software Update or from the iTunes download page.