ITunes Not Responding for 10+ Minutes After Launch

Question

Whenever I launch iTunes on my PowerBook G4, it takes over ten minutes to launch, during which time it is frozen (i.e., beach ball, shows as "Not Responding" in the Activity Monitor). This happens regardless of whether I connect to my local music library or my external drive library. The problem started a month or two ago, although I can't recall exactly when.
Once I let iTunes do whatever it's trying to do for the ten minutes or so, it's fine. It's just frustrating having to wait ten minutes every time I open iTunes, and having to deal with the CPU cranked at 100%.
Any ideas?
- Keith
P.S. I tried turning off Genius, and that did not do the trick.

Answer 1

Let's do a test to see just what iTunes is doing (hopefully).
Open Activity Monitor (Applicatons/Utilities) and select 'All Processes, Hierarchically' from the menu at the top right.
Click on the '% CPU' heading so that it turns blue. If the little triangle is pointing down, good. If not, click it again.
Open iTunes.
Find whatever goes to the top of the list. It will most likely be using at least 80% of your CPU.
What is it called?
With whatever is at the top of the list selected, click the Inspect icon.
Click the Statistics tab.
Take a screenshot of the window (Shift-Command-4 followed by the spacebar, then click on the window). You'll refer to this later.
Now, tell me what it says under the following:
Parent Process
Process Group
User
Recent Hangs
% CPU
CPU Time
Faults
Threads
As well as anything else you think I should know.
Also, look at the iTunes process. Is there a triangle next to it? If so, is the process using a lot of % CPU inside it? What's inside the iTunes process (indented, under it)?
We'll just use this test to learn more about what's going on when you open iTunes.