Windows 7 Home Premium user here, 32-bit as well. It really doesn't appear to matter what is open for me; as long as I've focused on some other window other than iTunes, it will inextricably start skipping almost exactly like a badly scratched CD. This is absolutely unacceptable, because this simply never happened before with any previous version of iTunes. It's simply gotten to the point where there are too many users experiencing the same issue. There are already many forum posts about this problem all over the net too, and Apple techs really haven't even responded about this at all? or are they assuming everyone's going to be more focused on listening to music on their brand new iDevices instead?
Really, everything is about quality control, right down to the software, and that absolutely should have included iTunes 10.7, but obviously that wasn't the case for my fellow windows users.