iTunes keeps 'quitting unexpectedly'… No way to stop it

iTunes 11.1.3 on a Retina Pro MacBook running OSX 10.8.5 is totally broken.

For some reason, iTunes has started to crash, flashing up a technical report that 'iTunes quit unexpectedly' (first part of the error report attached below).

This error keeps repeating in a loop, closing and re-opening iTunes without me actually doing anything. It does this about once every 2-3 seconds (seriously!!) so it has flashed this error report up (which jumps to the forefront and prevents me doing anything useful on any other app) at least 40 times while I was typing this short message. ARGH!!

The only way to stop this is to restart the MacBook (which is not easy because iTunes keeps cancelling the restart).

Any ideas anyone? Has this been fixed anywhere?

It's driving me nuts...

Process: iTunes [889]

Path: /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes

Identifier: com.apple.iTunes

Version: 11.1.3 (11.1.3)

Build Info: iTunes-1113011001003008~1

Code Type: X86-64 (Native)

Parent Process: launchd [118]

User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2013-12-21 23:04:57.190 +0000

OS Version: Mac OS X 10.8.5 (12F45)

Report Version: 10

Interval Since Last Report: 41980 sec

Crashes Since Last Report: 153

Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 103273 sec

Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 73

Anonymous UUID:

Crashed Thread: 0 iTunes main Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00007fff54994000