ITunes 10.5 randomly stutters when playing music

Question

Installed iTunes 10.5 last week to get new iOS for iPhone. I have a HP Pavillion notebook running WIndows 7 and have had no problem with iTunes before at all. Now, however, when I am playing music on iTunes little electronic glitches and stutters are audible. They are random and seem to affect both mp3 and aac. Nothing else on my computer has changed aside from the itunes update. VLC media player still seems to be fine.
I see some people are having distortion issues with the new iTunes, but this is more just a little distorted stutter for half a second or so every once or twice a minute.
Can I fix this, or will I have to wait for the next update of iTunes? Any help with this would be gratefully appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Denis,
I managed to fix a similar issue on Mac OS X:
"I am running 10.5.8 on an iMac 27 with a 2.66GHz i5 processor and got the same side-effects after I moved up to iTunes 10.5. Th e problem also continued when I downgraded to 10.4.1 as well, straight afterwards. However, I managed to resolve it fairly quickly in this way:
Opened the  Activity Monitor, and looked at the processes taking most resources.
The one that leapt out at the top, if ordered by % CPU, was "ShockWave Flash (Chrome Plug-in Host)".
So, I closed down Chrome and noted that it was still there. Thus, I sent a force quit to it and waited for it to die. I then re-opened iTunes and the annoying stuttering had gone. I've now got Chrome and this plug-in open and it has not returned. I suspect the issue may frequently be caused by a plug-in like this causing resource contention, but I can't say for sure as I've only seen this once.
My advice would be to close down, one by one,  as many apps as you can and constantly review activity ordered by CPU in Activity Monitor. If you think you can safely quit the process then do so and retry iTunes. If you're not sure, then gracefully shutdown and look again. Bear in mind, the problem may be launching at startup. Before shutting down, review your Login Items in System Prefs->Accounts->"My Account"->Login Items. Remove anything you can live without. You can always add them back in. If you manage to spot conflicting software then you can look for a patch or upgrade, but at least be aware that it does not play well with iTunes and thus quickly fix your issue."
May be you can follow a similar process on Windows? I would target your suspicions towards Adobe and Google components :-) !!!
Hope this helps.