ITunes Throttles CPU to 99% Usage

Question

Whenever I start iTunes, my new Gateway desktop's fan roars and blows hot air like a jet engine. Opening the Task Manager reveals that the iTunes process is running at 99%.
This continues until all podcasts have been updated. Then iTunes drops down to a 1% or 2% of CPU usage.
I am running a Intel Core Duo 2.8 GHz with Windows XP Media Center. My internet connection runs through an anonymizer proxy server.
Anyone have thoughts on what is going wrong with my software?

Answer 1

The problem is that Apple just don't know how to
write Windows software.
I won't argue with you there, although I'd add that from what I've seen, they don't know how to write very good Mac software either.
The issue is simply Apple assinging too high a task
priority to the update process and it overridges
everything else.
But I will argue with you there, because this is simply untrue. For example, my PC does not exhibit this problem. No CPU choking whatsoever. Not during playback, not while updating podcasts, zilch.
I suspect that your CPU is being stuck high because iTunes is going into a loop state when some other process is blocking access to some file, like, say, an anti-virus process would do.
One thing iTunes (stupidly) seems to do a whole lot is to continually close and reopen files. For certain overzealous file monitoring and scanning programs (anti-virus, anti-malware, etc), closing a file means that the anti-virus program will come along and open it in read mode, in order to scan it for bad things. If iTunes then comes along and tries to open it again in write mode, iTunes would get halted by the OS, until the anti-virus releases the file and write mode can be granted.
The only solution I know of would be to find the offending scanning program and temporarily disable it, or at least make it wait a bit before trying to scan recently closed files. Or switch to a less aggressive program.
I also add that we have seen this exact sort of issue in relation to certain anti-virus programs and iTunes, such as the "iTunes takes forever to shut down" bug, which is caused by an anti-virus program interfering with iTunes trying to write out the database after being closed. I've also seen it with other programs, such as uTorrent, which in some cases had issues with Google Desktop, since uTorrent had a "feature" that caused it to cycle all open files to closed and open again, every 5 minutes or so. Google Desktop would see the file close and attempt to index it, which honked up uTorrent trying to reopen it, which gave a nasty error and shutdown of the torrent download. It's just a bad idea for programs, in general, to close files when they know they are going to open them again shortly, and programs that do it tend to have relationship issues with other programs. iTunes has this issue a lot.