iTunes taking up way to much of my CPU

For some reason iTunes has become a computer hog lately...to the point where if I have ANYTHING else running the music distorts or skips...iTunes is pulling like 50,000K in memory usage...this is a bit ridiculous especially considering that WMP can run on like 20,000. If the CPU usage isn't the problem then I have other problems with iTunes cuz whenever it's running the music that is playing skips, even if I'm playing it with WMP and just have iTunes open! And my system specs are pretty good, 1 gig of ram and a 2ghz processor.