ITunes crashes at startup

Question

Hello,
Got a major issue here.
Suddenly my iTunes crashes everytime at startup.
First my specs and versions;
iMac 27" 2.66 Ghz Intel Corei5 with 8 GB DDR3
Version 10.8 Mountain Lion
iTunes version 10.6.3
iPhone 4 16 GB version 5.1.1
iPad 3 32 GB version 5.1.1 wifi only
This morning I planned cleaning up my iTunes Library. Get rid of songs I don't really like. And download some movies to my iPad to see when we are on holiday.
I was working for about 1/2 an hour then suddenly the rainbow ball appears and I can't click on anything in iTunes. The song plays on.
I forced iTunes to stop and restarted iTunes. This I did several times.
I've noticed that iTunes tried to connect to my iPhone and iPad but before it connects iTunes freezes.
I've searched the forum and found a solution given by James Mcdermotte1 here on the Apple forum. Open iPhoto and create a new library. Restart iTunes and it would be fixed.
This didn't work for me.
Then I disconnected both iPhone and iPad from wifi, so itunes didn't had to connect.
Didin't work eather.
I'm out of thoughts here, can anyone help me out. Quickly if possible as I'm leaving very soon on holiday.
Is the crash related to Mountain Lion???
Tx,
Danny

Answer 1

Another partial solution:
Open up iTunes in safe mode (press command and option when clicking on iTunes). This will disable any third-party visualization plugins you've installed. Even while connected to the internet, I don't get the usual hangup I was getting before.
Supposedly safe mode only disables the third party plugins. I only found one plugin (Quartz Composer Visualizer), and I don't think it is third party. I removed it from my plugins folder and restarted in regular mode... still got the crash (then I promptly movd the plugin back to the proper directory).
It's not an ideal solution, but starting up in this safe mode seems to solve the problem, and I haven't lost any functionality. Internet services like the iTunes store and iTunes match seem to work fine, too. I'd like to know what exactly it is that safe mode is doing to make this possible as well as why disconnecting from the internet helped, but I won't argue with success. Please post if you are still having problems so we can pinpoint the source.