iTunes Freezes Everytime It's Opened!!!

hi Melissa!

(a) you don't lose your library. i usually think that there's no point in tempting fate, and advise that people do a backup, anyway ... so if one of our backup gurus happens along, they should be able to suggest a technique that doesn't use itunes itself to do the backups.
b (StarDeb! Buegie! my dear The Mimico Kid! Melissa is in need!)

(b) these sorts of things can be tricky to sort out, but we can make progress with them. would you mind going to this thread here and looking at the preliminary questions i asked this other person?:

b noir, "i-tunes freezes and crashes after attempting to load a cd" #1, 03:19pm Aug 18, 2005 CDT

... could you then pop back here and reply to
b this
post with your answers to those questions. could you also let me know what brand of computer and CD drive you're using, please.

love, b

thank you! excellent answers to all the questions. although this is a pain for you, at least nothing
b really
alarming appears to be happening with your PC.

okay ... we'll start with the simpler possibilities.

(1) work through this document:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93444

(you've already done the repair install trick, but sometimes sterner measures are called for.)

these two references may also be helpful:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300252

toonz, "Where to find firmware for your CD/DVD drive", 05:55pm Apr 15, 2005 CDT

(2) and then try this document:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93647

... and then a couple from outside the three-point circle:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300198

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301946

if these don't help matters any, we can try poking around your Roxio, your CD drive and your error logs a little more closely.

keep us posted!

love, b

hmmmm. before uninstalling or reinstalling, would you try something for me?

open your Task Manager, and click on the Applications tab. Try launching itunes and waiting for the freeze (while watching the task manager window). Does another application switch on at the same time as itunes freezes?

if you don't see anything in that window, switch to the Processes tab. try the watch and wait technique again. does a process appear at exactly the same time as itunes freezes?

love, b

What I did notice pop up when when itunes freezes was 2 items both called "0132~1.exe"

the first thing to do is to download fresh definitions and run antivirus and antispyware scans immediately.

if that was a legitimate process, or even a known process, typing it letter-for-letter-punctuation-for-punctuation into a google box and doing a search would take us to several reputable sites who would tell us what it is. (ignore the sponsored results at the top, there's too many frauds and tricksters out there selling snake oil ... you go somewhere like neuber or liutilities.)

no such joy in this case. from now on we proceed on the assumption that there's something disreputable in your computer.

don't trust the results of the first scan. some worms/etc disable antiviral packages if they get a foothold, and leave you open to secondary infections. if need be, download different types of utilities, and run backup scans using those. here's some references:

CRae, "Severe: A later version of iTunes is already on this machine" #30, 12:04am Aug 18, 2005 CDT

Rick Van Vliet, "Severe: A later version of iTunes is already on this machine" #20, 04:17pm Aug 14, 2005 CDT

keep us posted.

love, b

Hey b...

I'm going to leave this one to you (don't worry...I won't steal your glory 😉 ), but I know I've occasionally seen valid processes on my laptop that have odd names like that...I think they're autogenerated on each run. I can't remember what they are offhand, but I want to say they're connected with either Check Point Integrety Flex (corporate version of Zone Alarm) or Symantec Antivirus. I wish I could remember more to tell you, but not all processes with odd names are bad.

Although checking for spyware and viruses makes sense as a first check anyways.

Another command that can be helpful to run is to open a command prompt and run "netstat -ao". That'll list all open network connections and processes listening for information. If your computer is clean, this will usually be about 40-50 lines long (depends on what you're doing on your machine). If you've got one of the common viruses, you'll often see hundreds of these connections. If so, the last column is the PID of the bad process; you can see the PID in the task manager by choosing it in the View->Select Columns... dialog box. Then you can sort on the PID to find the process in question.

Of course, most true viruses don't have this symptom, but most problems these days are worms. A worm, by it's very definition, would show this symptom, since it's characteristic of the worm trying to infect new machines.

hi Jonathan!

useful to know about the netstat -ao ... the only other technique i've had in these cases is a check of activity in the security logs.

perhaps i am overreacting a bit. the whole CRae business has me a bit on edge about the virus possibility.
b (twelve?)

actually ... if it is a ZoneAlarm (or related) thing, that's closer to what i was looking for in the first place with the wait and watch. my interest in the whole "NIS 2005 symptomless launch failure" thing started with a couple of cases of "symptomless shutdown", that turned out to be SpyDoctor and AOL topspeed respectively ... wasn't so convinced about that this time because the time period was a lot shorter and they weren't "freezing" the beast, but thought it was worth a crack.

in your experience, roughly how far apart do Zonealarm processes appear? if it's in the "every few minutes" range, i'll be less worried in this case. And considerably less worried if they didn't show up in association with the appearance of an application in the application tab ...

love, b

I wish I could tell you. I just know I've seen them. I don't tend to watch for them or how long they last, sorry...

What's CRae?

🙂 sorry ... assuming other people can see inside my head again ...

CRae is a nice person in another thread who ran afoul of the "Severe" error, which might have had something to do with the 12 viruses eating her laptop from the inside out ... search "CRae" if you dare ...

love, b

Hate to say this now but last night I was having similar problems after I updated to iTunes 5.0. The bad part is that I went away to dinner and came back an hour or 2 later and all was fine. My Task Manager was showing a huge impact on CPU performance with iTunes at first. I did a number of things that you did as well and was ready to re install. It seems that there is some initialization with the new version that may be causing part of the problem. Once I gave it enough time the problem seemed to correct itself.

hi Melissa!

🙂 no need at all to apologise. glad you got it sorted out in the end.

love, b