Itunes Crashes Whenever I Update(Nothing to do with Podcasts)

Question

Recently I restored my Itunes. Before I did that I unhide all my music files and placed it on my computer. After the restoring, I placed all the music I had in my Itunes onto my Ipod, then cleared my Itunes library, and put all the music from my Ipod back into the library(because I had at least 200 songs that were on my Ipod and not in my itunes library). So after I put all the music from the library into my Itunes, and I mean all of it, because I knew the Ipod would keep most dupilcates away. And it did, I would say about 30-40 songs got duplicated.
So yeah after all that, I couldn't remove/add, restore, or disconnect my Ipod without all of Itunes freezing up. What is going on? How should I fix this? Is it the duplicate thing, I don't get it. It worked when I put all the music into my Ipod, but now it won't work at all. It freezes everything and I have to use task manager to close my Itunes. Is it just 7.3, should I use 7.2. Where do I download that because whenever I go to Itunes I just get 7.3...

Answer 1

Just to fill out BDaqua's good advice a bit so you get some idea as to what is going on:
[Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393]
[What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X)|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107392]
[Safe Boot takes longer than normal startup|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107394]
And:
[MacFixit Forums Tutorial: Startup fails (particularly after a system or security update)|http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20060322080433175]