iTunes is 99.99% of the reason I am entirely steering clear of any Apple mobile devices in the future. Sadly, until this ipad gives up the ghost, I'm still locked into their ecosystem.
iTunes is the biggest gongshow, trainwreck piece of software on the Windows platform by far. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I think that's entirely intentional on Windows. It runs fine on a Mac, but not on Windows. I think they figure I'll get irked enough so I'll replace all my PC's with Mac's, lol.
I've had ZERO, and I mean ZERO issues with itunes on my macs. Friendly on memory, never crashes or bogs the machines down. Windows though, oooh boy, completely different story. Not uncommon on my systems to find it using 2+ GB of system RAM doing nothing at all, just the program loaded not even playing music or with a device attached.