Genius stuck on Gathering Information

After trying on and off for the past week or so to resolve this issue, I am about at my wits end. The problem is that everytime I launch iTunes, Genius always begins Gathering Information on my library, but freezes at about 33%. Nothing happens for hours and I do not subscribe to iTunes Match. In the end, I have to click on the X button to stop it so that I can use iTunes again. I would very much like to put an end to this inconvenience. Here's what I've tried:

- Rebooting, restarting, defragging, scanning for viruses (came back clean).

- Disabling the Store/Genius under Parental Preferences (curiously, when I have the store enabled, I do not see an option to disable Genius either their or under Store Preferences where I've heard it should be).

- Under General Preferences, I do not have Genius checked as a source.

- Doing a SHIFT+Start and creating a new library, then reloading my old one.

- Deleting the itdb files for Genius and Extras as well as the sentinel file and a preferences .plist file and then restarting.

- Using procmon to find a corrupt file. Couldn't see what could be the problem. It keeps trying to access the Genius files along with their .journal/.wal variations. Couldn't find any music file in the logs.

Needless to say nothing worked, else I wouldn't be posting for help. I have also replicated this problem using a fresh install of itunes on a second machine with my old library. I have also tried reimporting all my music on the secondary machine into a new library and it seems to work fine, however metadata such as Date Added has been lost so I would like to avoid using this fix if at all possible. Any thoughts?