iTunes 10.6.3.25 very slow to respond - Windows 7 64 bit

After having sworn off iTunes over 10 years ago, I just installed the latest version this weekend -- my kids gave me a Touch for Father's Day and my son assured me that iTunes had improved over the years. My experiences with it so far would indicate that is not the case.

It takes a number of minutes to synch to my iPod Touch (8Gb version) -- this was before there was even any music on it. While this is happening, the iTUnes exe is using one full core of CPU processing continually, and the program is unresponsive in Windows. After much waiting, I managed to get a small test selection of music on the device. If I play this from within iTunes, it will play, but if I then pick a different song to play, I need to again wait several minutes durig which iTunes is again unresponsive. The same wait occurs trying to exit iTunes. I have disabled auto synching, but I am still getting these ridiculous delays. This is on a fast Intel Core i7 machine, so I can only imagine how long this would take on an older machine. While this hang is occuring, there is one maxed out core, but there is no change to memory usage, so nothing is actually happening, and the program is just spinnning its wheels. (Without handling the Windows message queue properly, either.) This should not be this painful. These are small mp3 files being transferred onto a small device. These transfers and synchs should take miliseconds, not minutes..

Anyone have any suggestions? I feel like I'm back in 1995 when I try to use this program.