When the Apple Fails Far From the Tree

I use iTunes for Windows.  Today, I got a pop-up window about updating to version 11.1.  I did -- and later noticed that for all the podcasts I'm subscribed to, it now displays in the iCloud every episode going back three years!  But that's not the bad part -- it's that there's no way to delete them.  Hitting "Delete" doesn't work, and when you right-click with the mouse, there's no "Delete" option!  (I did discover than if you download an episode, then you can delete it.  But given that there are literally several hundred of these, that's no solution.

I did a search to discover what I'm missing -- and it turns out at that I'm not "missing" anything at all.  This is a big, general problem, and the Apple boards are overwhelmed by people screaming bloody murder about this  In fact, it turns out that for some people, old podcasts that they had archived and been saving are done gone.  I skimmed through probably 75 posts with the same complaint before I gave up.  There were pages and pages more unread.

Not a great job with the upgrade, I'd say...