The solution to the iTunes play count problem, at least for my situation

After almost a month of using VBScript to update play counts on iTunes 12.7 on my Windows 8 computer, I decided to Google it again, see if maybe anyone else had come up with a solution.

Indeed someone did: responding to "bobmel1," "rcannon3" says:

I too was having this issue, I fixed mine by signing out of iTunes and back in, now it's working again.

I looked on iTunes and saw that was I signed. I did Account > Sign Out, didn't sign back in, and now, voilà! Problem fixed.

I play a track, then iTunes updates the play count, and it also updates accordingly the various Smart Playlists I have which use either play count or last played date, or both. It's good to have things back to normal.