I swear, one day I'll learn. Despite having promised myself to steer clear of the initial release of any Windows version of iTunes because they are consistently broke in some pretty severe ways - I read this report on Engadget and decided to upgrade thinking that they may finally haved solved the issues I have been having. (My main one being that I could consistently crash iTunes on any PC by downloading a podcast and pressing the "pause" button during the download).
However, iTunes 7.6 gave me a great new issue - iTunes wouldn't close. Every time I tried to close it (by pressing the X button, or doing File, Close) it would freeze and start consuming as much of my CPU as possible - the only way to get rid of it was to kill the process in Task Manager.
Anyway - after a bit of playing, I eventually figured out that this was something wrong with how they are calling Bonjour. iTunes has the ability to listen for other shared libraries and to share your own library - which is something I had enabled so that I could stream stuff off my laptop onto the Mac Mini and vice-versa. It does this using Apple's Bonjour service.
On my system, the Bonjour service is installed under the catchy name of
"##Id_String1.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762##"
Very user friendly - I think I'll start using GUID's for all my user interfaces :-). Anyway. If I stop this service, I can close iTunes down happily. It will even now let me go into the preferences in iTunes and disable sharing - something that was locking up iTunes 7.6 before (and what made me suspect the Bonjour integration).
Therefore - if you are having the same problems as me, right click on My Computer and select Manage. Then go to Services and Applications, Services, select "##Id_String1.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762##" and press "Stop". Then right click, select properties and change the Start-up type from "Automatic" to "Disabled".
This obviously removes the sharing capabilities - but at least it allows you to sync your iPod. When I finally got iTunes 7.6 to actually work a little bit, I was unsurprised to see that they have still not fixed the bug with the download manager, so if you attempt to do anything to a downloading purchase, podcast or whatever then it will still crash iTunes and will consume most of the available CPU while downloading. Sigh.
Update:People are reporting that this same issue is true with iTunes 7.6, 7.7 and 7.7.1 so I've removed the version number from the title of this post. Luckily now that I've disabled Bonjour and sharing things seem to be working better for me so hadn't noticed myself that this was the case. Additionally, if you have ESET NOD32 Antivirus installed then you might want to look at this forum post.
I was having the exact same problem. Thanks for fixing it.
Sounds just like my fix for Windows Defender :) It doesn't crash my PC - it just hogs CPU when it kicks off (usually triggered by me wanting to do something in a hurry and needing all the CPU I can get. How does it know?) In another stroke of great UI design it and doesn't have a pause button. Now every time I boot up windows I smile when a pop up appears to say there's an error and it couldn't start the process.
thanks so much man
OMG thank you SO much for this! I was having exactly the same problem with itunes freezing on close and it was driving me insane. I searched the apple site and found nothing helpful. I even tried reinstalling it to no avail. Stopping the Bonjour service fixed this perfectly for me. Thank you again!
Thanks! Works like a charm
OMG!! You are the coolest! THANK YOU!!!!
Amazing. Great fix!
Hey, thanks man. I was having that same problem. Nice find.
Thankyou so much! That's fixed it. :-D
fixed! - many, many thanks.
OMG! I've been trying to sort this for ages! It has been doing my head in so much. You rule!!!
You having my deepest thanks.
Yup! Worked for me. Thnx
well i have itunes and it sucks, first of all is super slow and thank god i dd nt set it up as my default player because it would take hours to load and well, i have an ipod and when i conected to my PC windows vista it takes like 30 min to update my music tht is why i dont update my ipod tht much, my friend got the new ipod nano and well he was going to conected to my laptop and i got an error saying tht my itunes was an old version i was ok, i'd download the new itunes, wht a surprise the stupid new itunes took up to 4 hours to be downloadd to my computer, i was so mad tht i told my friend, to buy the zune or other mp3 player because this itunes crap its nt working fr me, i even thought of purchasing a new ipod but hell no!!!!!!! im going to sell my old version 27gb and get a "normal" mp3 player, and also i was thinking of getting a mcbook but hells to the NO!!!!!!i'd rather keep my PC windows vista might suck but its better then the itunes
Thanks so much, not being able to close iTunes in Vista was driving me nuts!
Thanks so much. This was driving me crazy - I finally stopped getting mad and figured out where it was freezing, then searched and found your post. Fixed it right away.
Same problem with the new itunes, followed this instruccions for the lates realease in jully 11, and new iphone fixed the problem.
Thank you very much!!!!!!
Just want to join the chorus praising you for this simple and invaluable fix. Just followed your steps, and now iTunes closes without causing any trouble :)
Thank you!
Great tip. Thanks a million.
hey man, thanks much. i google'd this problem and i stumbled into your entry.
Thanks for the link to the ESET info. Worked perfectly.
EXCELLENT!
Itunes was freezing up and doing my head in, and I thought it was bad programmers at Apple doing this on purpose. It turned out that my NOD32 2.7 was acting up.
Thank you so much for the fix. Worked excellent.
Itunes 7.7 in Windows XP SP3 runs smooth.
=)