ITunes opens to black screen

Question

I've tried to contact apple about this issue, but after telling me, "We'll get back to you", they just close the case. I contacted them January 28, the case shows as closed January 27 (no, not a typo). I contacted the support rep by email asking the status on Feb 15, and received NO reply. I called today (2/21) and was told that they have no idea why the case was closed--but, they still didn't know how to fix it.
Below are screenshots of what's happening... The first one is what greets me on EVERY SINGLE launch of iTunes.
http://www.wolfsnap.com/photos/793561578_XLUMZ-L.png
To fix it, I need to do three steps:
http://www.wolfsnap.com/photos/793561581_xKukN-L.png
I've tried to re-create the itunes database by moving my existing library, still didn't fix the issue.
There has been some talk about this issue before (I could find as early as 2007), but, so far, I can't find a definitive answer on how to fix it. Can anyone help me solve this issue?
David

Answer 1

Multiple monitors, Windows 7, some display things not showing up how they ought to look ... I've seen something on this recently.
Found it ... actually, found them.
I'm wondering if we've got an iTunes bug on top of a Windows 7 bug here.
There's a couple of currently-recognised issues with multiple monitors on Windows 7:
[The taskbar appears on the wrong monitor after you change the primary monitor in Windows 7|http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2002029]
[Taskbar and Desktop Icons Do Not Display on Primary Monitor|http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295650/en-us]
I'm wondering if the iTunes display preferences are tripping up when trying to deal with this, and doing something silly like attempting (but failing) to display the contents of the iTunes GUI on the wrong monitor. So we get a black area in the middle of the iTunes GUI.
There's some quite strong connections between the iTunes preferences and the library files. (Some information about tracks is stored in the library database files, some in the preferences files, some in the tags on the content files, and they all dance around each other quite a bit.) So that might explain why the display comes back when you play tracks. The interplay between track, library and preference data jolts the display preferences into behaving sensibly.
If iTunes is opened in a different user account, with a blank library, there's no information in the content files (because there is no content). So the conditions for the effect to occur might not be met, because we don't have the same sort of interplay between library, content and preferences going on. So that might be the difference between the normal account and the test account.
I guess, to try to work out if any of that could be possibly the case, we could test this by disconnecting one of the monitors ... does the iTunes display behave normally when there's only one monitor attached to the system?