I will not purchase another Apple product until iTunes is sorted.

Question

I am an iPhone and iPad user for work and for home. Let's be clear, I think those products are great. I rely on them heavily for day to day life. They are however hampered by the inability of iTunes to do anything properly. I am an IT literate person and have a lot of experience of using many different pieces of software and I can categorically state that iTunes is the worst piece of software I have ever used.
Examples:
Just downloaded iOS 5. Was updating my iPhone and the sync crashed halfway through. I now have an iPhone where no apps work. iTunes currently crashes every time I try to re-sync it.
The whole sync experience is poor. It is often confusing and I generally start a sync with a feeling of dread. It is not the consumer experience that Apple should be giving people.
Sync speed is ridiculously slow. I have 32Gb iPad and iPhone. Sync often takes over an hour. Even though my iTunes library is stored on a NAS there is no excuse for this poor performance.
If I rip music from CD's using windows media player, WMP will find the album art and song titles every time without fail without me having to do anything else. If I then try to import those files into iTunes, almost certainly it will not find the correct album art. I would understand this if I was listening to obscure music but this recently happened with the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album. Ironically, while the message 'Cannot find Album Art' was being displayed, the album and it's artwork was being shown on the Ping bar.
So, I have had enough. While the devices themselves look and work brilliantly they are let down badly by the software. Just google 'iTunes problems' and there are pages and pages of issues heading back many years. Apple needs to grasp the nettle and rewrite iTunes.
Until they do so, I will not be purchasing any more Apple products. If you agree, I hope you do the same.
David

Answer 1

My iphone 4 is having problems with backups.  It just hangs, yet applemobiledevice is hogging 25% CPU.  I also can not access the itunes store to see apps and what not.  I too am on Win 7 64 Bit running the latest version of 10.5.  I have tried deleting all backups and starting fresh, netsh winsock reset, and creating a new windows 7 account and trying to backup that way.  So far no luck at all.  I have also tried uninstalling all apple software and rebooting, then reinstalling. 
I wonder if there is a beta version of itunes 10.5 that was less buggy we could use.  I am convinced the public release of itunes 10.5 is just not going to work for me. 
I applied my windows updates yesterday when trying to get all of this to work.  It was not working so I thought you know what let me go ahead and install these updates still didnt work.  So I can say for me with or without windows updates it did not matter.
I also tried deleting the itunesprefs files in my user profile.  That did not work either.
Im out of ideas at the moment, I have sort of just told myself i better just accept that I will not have ios5 until apple releases a new version of itunes.  Ill update here if I find a solution or if I try anything else.
Erik