ITunes Running Slowly after 10.6 update

Question

i just fixed my external hard drive, where i keep all of my music and was so happy to finally use iTunes again. However i notice now that itunes has a laggy feeling overall and is generally unresponsive. For instance, adding new tracks takes about half an hour (100mb worth). I drag the folder into iTunes, and i get the spinning wheel. it stays for about 5 min, then shows its uploading the tracks. the tracks tend to move at a very slow rate. Even once they have been added, iTunes is "determinig gapless playback" and that takes a good hour for 100 songs. while this is going on, if i try to click on a song or play a song, the spinning wheel comes back. Now once everything is finished loading i play a song, and am enjoying it right until the end. With about 3 seconds left iTunes freezes up and takes about 2 min to change to the next track. really frustrating and annoying issue. any help would be appreciated.
ps i have always stored my music on an external drive and this has never been the case, so maybe its something with the new iTunes because the R/RW speed of the disk is good for everything else.
OS X Lion 10.7.3
2.2 GHz intel core 2 duo
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Answer 1

restart fixed the problem. I have NO idea what caused it though.