My thorough list of problems after updating to iTunes 7

Question

I've been reading the topics around. Some of these problems below seem to be sort of common, with slight differences in my case. Some others I couldn't figure out whether anyone else has experienced them.
First of all, unlike in a lot of the topics that I've read around, I didn't have any problems installing iTunes 7 (although the problems started right after I turned it on for the first time...). Nor did I have any problems updating the software on my iPod to version 1.2, which I have to say, unlike iTunes 7, seems to be very nice, particularly on the new detail of searching the long lists of songs/artists/albums alphabetically.
1) The least serious of the bugs on iTunes already used to happen to me with the previous version 6. Occasionaly, when I plug in my iPod to the computer, iTunes doesn't recognize it properly. Instead of the 5th generation video, it shows up on iTunes as a previous generation iPod without video. What happens then is that iTunes screws up the whole artwork settings on the iPod. It starts off by switching off the artwork visualization option on my iPod, the next time it correctly recognizes it as the 60 G video model. And when I turn the option back on, as it should always have stayed, iTunes proceeds to reorganize the whole artwork list on the iPod, by first deleting it completely and then optimizing it. When one has the iPod with more than 20 G full of albums (let alone when it's 60 G are completely full...), this is something that already takes a lot of time and becomes irritating, taking into account that it happens sort of randomly: you plug in the iPod and pray that iTunes recognizes it properly. It used to happen to me quite frequently with iTunes 6, and I thought it would be fixed with the new version 7. But it hasn't: yesterday it already happened to me again, once, after I plugged/unplugged it some 10-15 times. The frequency of the ocurrence of the problem, at least, seems to have decreased, when compared to iTunes 6.
2) As opposed to the previous problem, the most serious happend to me right after I started iTunes 7 for the very first time, with the iPod plugged in. Like it has already been reported by several particpants in this forum, it started doing the infamous gapless analysis on my BIG iPod song library and it froze after a while, finally crashing with the usual message "Do you want to send a report to Microsoft". Up to this point, this seems to be common with a lot of users of the new version 7. With me, it went farther. I was the one that froze right afterwards: when I started iTunes again, I realized that in the process of freezing/crashing/restarting iTunes had switched off my manual update option on the iPod, instantaneously erasing about 5000 songs that I had loaded in it. The problem is that I didn't have enough space on my computer hard-disk to hold those 25 G of music, so I only kept them on the iPod whereas my iTunes music library was essentially empty. And there I am now, importing every single one of my CDs back into iTunes and to the iPod, something that will take me another couple of weeks at least.
3) Taking into account the previous point, I am essentially using iTunes 7 now from the start with an empty library, importing every CD back from scratch, as if this was my first encounter with iTunes and iPod. I cannot see then what it could have done to an already existing music library on the computer (other than completely erasing the one that I had on the iPod), like some damage that also I read happened to some people. With the CDs being imported all over again with iTunes 7, it no longer does any gapless analysis of anything, because there are no songs imported with previous iTunes versions to be analyzed. The sound is also fine: I don't get any of the static or garbled noises that I read were also troubling a lot of people.
4) As for the crossfading/gapless discussion, after experimenting with those (now infamous) two options for a while, I got to the conclusion that there's really no point at all in having them, even when they work well... let alone the serious problems that their introduction on iTunes 7 has been causing. By turning the crossfading option on, I can see that iTunes merges the end of one song with the beginning of the following one, with time lengths depending on the slider position chosen by the user in the corresponding option's window. But it's something that I personally dislike a lot, to have both songs sort of being played on top of each other, during their transition. So I switched it off. On the other hand, the gapless playback seemed to be a nice welcome. It is true that, until this version 7 came up, on certain albums, like in the classical "Sgt. Pepper's Lonley Hearts Club Band" (that supposedly first started that concept) or a lot of the Pink Floyd ones, where the songs are almost continuous without any pauses between them, both iTunes and the iPod used to force an inconvenient pause between the songs. I then imagined that this gapless option would at least improve on that. But what I've figured out by now, after using iTunes 7 for three days, is that if the original albums don't have any pauses between songs, iTunes 7 now imports those albums exactly as they are, without any pauses either, even if both the crossfading and the gapless option are switched off. In other words, after importing my "Sgt. Pepper's" and "Dark Side of the Moon" CDs again with iTunes 7, I no longer get forced pauses between the songs like I used to get before, either on iTunes, or in the iPod. This, even though I make sure that those two options are switched off. The gapless playback seems then to be sort of automatic now on iTunes 7, as it should, if that's the way the original imported album is also recorded. And this troublesome gapless option seems then to be a completely useless thing, unless the idea is to fix songs imported with previous iTunes versions, or to force gapless playing on albums that originally have pauses.
5) As many people have noted already, the "Drag and drop" album artwork window only works for single songs. If one wants to cut and paste the artwork into that window for several selected songs or a whole album at once, like it could be done on iTunes 6, that's not working now. One has to select all the songs and then, with the right mouse button, choose the info window to paste the artwork into the small box there.
6) Finally, when the iPod is plugged to the computer, some viewing configurations on iTunes are not being memorized either. For example, I always turn the browser option on (Ctrl+B), so that I can see the artists and albums lists, on top of the complete song list. But everytime I plug the iPod back on, that option is switched off. For the main iTunes music library it's OK: I've only needed to do it once, and now that viweing configuration has been there forever, everytime I start iTunes. But whenever I plug the iPod and click on its music library, I then need to press Ctrl+B every time, because iTunes doesn't seem to keep that viewing option switched on from the previous time the iPod was plugged. Again, this is something that worked fine with iTunes 6.
Conclusion: there are indeed a lot of bugs to be fixed with this new version of iTunes, some of them highly damaging to the saved libraries. IF YOU STILL HAVEN'T UPDATED TO VERSION 7, DON'T DO IT YET. WAIT A FEW WEEKS UNTIL APPLE FIXES ALL THIS.
  Windows XP Pro   Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz, iPod Video 60 G

Answer 1

Upgrading to itunes 7.0 just cost me 2 days of messing around and in the end I had to revert back to v6.0 and resore my lib.
Apple CS was good but did not belly up the fact that 7.0 is defective in some cases and in the end told me I had a hardware problem!
The main issue is that I could not get itunes 7.0 to see my ipod (very infrequently after a hard boot I would see it but would not be able to upload anything). Worked(s) 100% with v 6.0.
This is very defintey 1/2 baked following in the steps of the other well known producers of sw that is not always functional/buggy the first time around.
My computer is a x40 IBM laptop with xp sp2. Will have to wait a few more weeks to see how this pans out.
IBM X40 Windows XP