Crashes & Passwords

Question

I will preface this with the fact that I have been having endless problems with iTunes in the past few months and find myself at my wits end. I have an HP laptop running Win7. This is the only program that has ever given me problems. Here are the two most current issues.
1 - Crashing. This started long ago and has continued through the past three to four updates. I start up iTunes, go to the store front... my system freezes then either shuts down or restarts (no clear pattern on that). Open it up again after the restart, go to my library (I've tried all categories) and away we go again with the crashing. I have long since learned to close everything else down before attempting to access the program. On occasion it will behave and I can access everything without problem. It had been behaving itself for a couple weeks when I got a pop-up saying there was yet another update. I passed it up as I was simply happy to have it working and didn't want to go through the fuss all over again. Apparently that was a mistake as it started crashing out again. So I downloaded and installed the latest update last night. I have done clean uninstalls and reinstalled the program at least five times to no change. I have tried running it with and without my virus/malware program. I defrag, clean, and check my system on a regular basis. No other program has ever done this.
2 - Miracle of miracles, it decided to work this morning. No system changes between last night when it crashed and this morning. I had a large-ish album downloading when this latest round of crashing started so it started downloading once more. Now its giving me a new problem. It's now asking for my password twice before each song is downloaded. For fear it may start crashing again I'm going to jump through these hoops on the last three songs (we started with twenty this morning) and restart the system. I'll post results.
Oh and I have the latest update running on my fathers XP desktop (a POS emachine) without any problems of any kind. Perhaps there are laptop compatibility issues that Apple really needs to work on?
Can anyone help? Is anyone else having these problems?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with my iTunes just recently. For me it actually didn't start until the iTunes 9 upgrade but this may still be relavant.
The problem I found, after trying every step on the iTunes support page, was with my Anti-virus program. It was preventing iTunes from connecting to the iTunes sever which authenticates accounts and songs, blah blah blah.
I was using on called PC Security and changed to the latest Norton Suite. The only other time I've had it crash was when I was running MS Outlook at the same time. This was fixed when I restarted Outlook and found out that the Norton Anti-Spam add-on for Outlook was having issues. Turned it off and haven't had a crash in 2 or 3 days.
Hope this helps.