It no longer hangs at "finishing sync"...so I'm happy with the update. I have no other issues with it now.
Now it hangs at "Waiting for changes to be applied".
They just moved the issue.
I wish I hadn't upgraded to iTunes 11. The previous version rocked, was intuitive and they built in the features that we liked over the years.
In the name of "innovation" demanded by many in here Apple re-did iTunes and it is no longer intuitive, functions are hidden or very hard to find, what didn't require fixing is now broke (Podcasts, album art), etc, etc and it still runs slowly and hangs. I can't even get the thing to copy a new playlist to my iPad (yes I check marked the new playlist).
Also bug fixes trickle through at a glacial pace, as though there is no priority given to these.
Apple won't hire programmers unless they graduated from high-faluting universities. I applied for Apple jobs several times and never got any reply that they even received my application. I expect these "superstars" to do a much better job than what I've suffered through with iTunes 11 and iOS 7.