iTunes crashes on launch

I recently got an iPhone 4S. Around that time I updated iTunes and did all of the necessary syncing to get my phone the way I like it. It has been about 2 weeks or so since I've had iTunes running, and this evening when I tried to start it up the program would hang on launch, and as it was saying that it was "accessing the iTunes store" it would all of a sudden crash. I did this a few times with no change. So I went and looked to see if there were any updates (only one for iPhoto) and then quit all of my running programs (I tend to have many open windows in Safari) and restarted my computer. After my restart I tried to launch iTunes again and this time it seemed to get a little bit further, but it still crashed while trying to access the iTunes store. I tried to see if anyone else was having this issue in the discussions page, but no hits that I could find. Any ideas? I'd love to hear some suggestions please. I would like to sync some new info onto my laptop, and I choose not to use iCloud for everything in order to preserve my battery, among other reasons. Any advice or information would be greatly appreciated, please. And thank you, in advance!

By the way, as far as I know I am running the most recent update of iTunes and I'm still on SnowLeopard at the moment...thanks again!