CrazyCloud14,
I feel your pain. When this 1st happend, I had no idea what went wrong except I knew was I had a new Dell Inspiron and at some point the store broke. iTunes was working fine on my 1-month old computer and around an update to 10.6, things fell apart. It was frustrating to a point where I did a factory restore and started loading software one at a time until it broke. This is when I concluded it was RealPlayer 15 and iTunes 10.6. Fortunatly when I removed the RealPlayer, iTunes started working. The one thing you can do is in the help menu of iTunes where there is an option to run Diagnostics for iTunes. This is when I found the problem why when starting the software, the store just sat there blank. I'm with you in that I've used iTunes for many years with little problems until recently. Luckily I have found Amazon store has been flawless for music purchases and even have things on sale.
Long story short, I was lucky in that I had an idea when iTunes broke. Something is getting in the way so run Diagnostics to see if you can even talk to the store. If not, then either another program is conflicting, the firewall or anti-virus program is blocking it.
There is an update to 10.6 (10.6.1) that just came out not to long ago and you can try it. Doubt you can go back to a prior release that worked since it updates the database during release updates. Unless you do a clean install and add your music again - which I can't imagine would be fun.
Run Diagnostics and see where that takes you then look in your program list to see when you installed each program and possibly start peeling things back.
I wish you the best and good luck.
