ITunes 11 problems, can anyone help?

Question

After updating to iTunes 11 today, I was pleased with the speed of the software relative to the older version. However after shutting down my computer and restarting later (and yes, I did close iTunes normally once it had finished doing everything it needed to,) I found that the preferences that I had changed earlier had been forgotten. This included:
1.     Sort Order of playlists/library.
2.     Display of the sidebar, status bar and menu bar had reverted back to not visible.
3.     Newly created smart playlists had been lost
4.     Equaliser preset had also been forgotten
Additionally, has anyone found a way to re-enable the old album artist view in the main library (with the album art), I miss this feature and would like to get it back if possible? I'm also confsued as to why the iCloud status of all of the tracks in my library appears to be stuck on waiting.
As a final note, I'm not using this as an excuse to have a good go at the flaws of iTunes 11, I'm just looking for solutions and to help others who may have experienced the same problems. As you can imagine, having an hour of your time lost isn't the most pleasing thing imagineable! Apart from these issues I think Apple has done a good job of iTunes 11, any help you can provide is much appreciated!

Answer 1

Just for everyone's benefit, I figured out one problem: If you're really keen to have the album art shown in the whole library view, create a smart playlist wiht the following parameters:
Playlist is Music, No limit to set, live updating.
This will take all of the music in your library and put it in this playlist, once you've done this open the playlist, change the view (top right hand corner of the screen) to artist view, and a view similar to the old one will be shown.
Hope this helps!