Itunes and IPhone 3G help please

Hello and first off i just found this place because i searched for a problem i had on my iphone and this seemed a good place.

ok i updated my Iphone 3G to 4.1 last night and when i tried to restore all my contacts etc etc itunes decided to corrupt and wont let me open it.

all my contacts are on itunes and it wont let me update itunes now because it wont open and everytime i click itunes to open it basicly tells me it wont open and i need to reinstall itunes.

so its a catch 22 situation because i cant open itunes to reinstall it and i dont want to uninstall it because i will lose all my contacts.

is there anyway of getting my contacts off my hard drive because i have/had over 250 and some are really important and cant afford to lose them.

also why cant you save your contacts on your sim card on a iphone ? because this would solve my trouble from the first instance.

well i took a gamble and this is what ive done to get sorted..

i typed apple in my search and it brought a return of "check for updates" which was the itunes logo.

it let me then update my itunes that when it was done let me resync and restore to the time when all my contacts and pretty much everything was on.

happy days


i will stick around on this place as it seems a great place to learn stuff about apple products