More on step 2 freezing

Question

First time through iTunes match found about 13000 matched songs and needed to upload about 4000. It ran for about 30 hours and completed about 1000 uploads before it crashed/hung. After I restarted it (reboot) it quickly (relative term!) got to the point of having to upload the remaining 3000; so the good news is that the 13000+1000 songs are in the cloud. The bad news is that it now hangs repeatedly on the first of the songs it is trying to upload.
So I restarted iTunes and stopped iTunes match before it could hang. Deleted all the songs marked 'waiting' out of iTunes and told iTunes match to start again. The 3000 songs that had not been uploaded were shown as available for 'download from iCloud' but greyed out. So I then deleted them from iCloud too. iTunes match now completes and tells me there are about 14000 songs available. (I'd already deleted all the ineligible, error and duplicates).
Now here's the interesting bit... if I add one more song to iTunes, iTunes match hangs on step 2 saying matched 14000 of 14001 songs. I can delete that new song from iTunes and iCloud and the match process completes saying I've got 14000 songs. This is completely repeatable for any random song from the 3000 yet to be uploaded.
Also... I deleted two songs that had successfully been added to the cloud (one uploaded and one matched). Run iTunes match again and now it completes showing 13998 songs. Now adding the two deleted songs back iTunes match hangs in step 2 with 13988 of 14000 songs checked.
So what's going on here? Obviously not a poisonous song as trying to upload a song that had previously succeeded now fails. The local and iCloud databases seem to be ok as the process goes to completion without the extra song. Doesn't seem to be an iTunes match server overload as when you tell it to update iTunes match (with only the 14000 songs that are already uploaded) it goes through the whole step 1/2/3 process.
Other threads seem to indicate that the iTunes match servers are overloaded. Could be... but just hanging is not good user feedback. Is there any way to tell for sure? If I a wait a day/week/month is it going to be fixed?
(All the numbers rounded... but you get the idea!).
Any ideas where to look next?
iTunes 10.5.2.11 on Win XP SP3

Answer 1

I'm pretty certain that it is an overload issue, that has caused a more serious problem for some users.
At first I thought that it was a track that was causing the problem, and did some deleting similar to what you did with the same results. I then remembered that new countries had been added, came here and saw that others were having exactly the same problem.
The fact that so many people are suddenly having an identical problem at the same time means that it is extremely likely to be a problem at Apple's end (we certainly haven't all just got to a tricky track at the same time). That it is related to the new countries coming online is an assumption, but it has to be quite likely.
It needs reporting to Apple, so they can tell that it is a significant issue, but there really is little else we can do at the moment.
If it is a problem at Apples end then it is extremely likely that it will get fixed pretty quickly. The fact that it has frozen, rather than just running slowly, suggests that something has actually gone wrong, rather than just being network traffic. This will probably mean that it needs fixing, rather than just waiting for the traffic to subside, but I'd imagine that it is being dealt with now, especially if it is being reported.