Okay, so some of you probably wouldn't expect me to use an Apple product, but I have to say I really found the iTunes program appealing as a music manager. And this is despite what I would have thought was an equal dislike for managers in the first place, particularly ones that operate in a soup fashion.

Regardless, I may have to discontinue my use of it, because it's causing some problems on my system.

So, I had it open today and I inserted a music CD into my system. I had no plans to have iTunes either rip it or even play it. I was going to rip it in EAC. That didn't matter, because most of my machine froze up, Windows couldn't finish opening the disc, and most tasks stopped responding. So I tried to close iTunes [by ending the task]. No luck. I couldn't close it. It just hung and wouldn't close out. I tried closing it in the other system processes program I like (Process Explorer), which usually has better luck. No dice. I couldn't even shut down the system because Windows couldn't close iTunes.

So after a hard reset, I tried something else. I tried simply opening and closing iTunes from a fresh boot. Same thing happend. It wouldn't close.

This is quite frustrating. I don't want to have to restart my system every time I've had iTunes open and I want to put a CD in.

The other problem I've had is that Apple has made all these other services run on my machine. The less confusing is "iTunesHelper", but I'd still like to know what it does. The other is "iPodServices". Why the hell would it make this run all the time, when I don't have a damn iPod? Why would it assume that? I'd go into iTunes and check on whether that can be disabled, but, God forbid, I need to burn a CD in a bit.

Other than all this, I think it's a nice program.