sys3175 – It’s not garbage. I have recently been running machines with XP, Vista (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and now Windows 7 64-bit. I can’t attest to the 32-bit version of Windows 7 not having the issue, as I haven’t run it, but I didn’t have these issues. I am running a clean install of Windows 7 on a brand new machine with loads of power. iTunes installed without issue, and I was able to sync it up without issue before adding items. The following steps produced the problem: I created a new playlist and added mp3 files to it. That’s it. iTunes just sat there like it was about to process it, but never did. I rebooted, and retried this very simple procedure several times with identical results.
My hypothesis on the cause is that some hardware configurations, with the new and drivers for Windows 7, are having issues with iTunes 9. My wife has a Windows 7 64-bit system that’s slightly different from mine, and she isn’t having these problems. Tonight I’m going to clean and restore my iPhone and see if that doesn’t fix the problems. It’s likely that in a few weeks patches will be available that will fix many of these issues. I recall when first adopting Vista several problems made it seem an unstable OS. A lot of people still hate Vista, but I’ve used it for awhile now successfully. A little initial pain with integrating Windows 7 is not the end of the world.