iTunes 7.6 is indeed a mess.
There were so many posts on apple' boards that they created a permanent topic linking to a technical note on this issue :
http://discussions.apple.com/ann.jspa?annID=552 . A pure MS attitude if you ask me, instead of fixing the problem.
Especially since Apple's answer to this problem is so outraging:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307419
quote:
Check iTunes to see if there are any rental movies in the iTunes library. If there are rentals, create a separate iTunes library for downloading and watching rented movies and only use your original iTunes library for music, ringtones, TV shows, and other content."
So user-friendly, isn'it?
We also have this gem:
quote:
Having large MPEG or MPG files in your library can cause iTunes 7.6 to exhibit this behavior
In my case, "large" mpgs were 80MB in size. What is that, Apple, 1993?
An undocumented solution is also to uncheck the "automatically sync with connected iphone/ipod" in the preferences.
Having done all of this, iTunes 7.6 is still nearly unusable on my G4 1.33.
iTunes is amazingly the lowest-quality product Apple has distributed in a while.