Oh my goodness.
I've recently started using iTunes a lot, and have downloaded loads of podcasts in the past couple of days.
I powered off my iMac this afternoon because of threatening thunderstorms, and it powered back up tonight with no problem.
Everything seems to be working just fine, but I get the spinning rainbow ball when I open iTunes. It doesn't respond to Command-Q, and the menu is unresponsive.
Firefox, Safari, Thunderbird, NeoOffice and iChat all opened normally, so I think the problem is limited to iTunes.
There is no kind of error message of any kind.
I've never done any kind of re-install on a Mac, and I don't have a backup of iTunes (waiting on my iPod).
What do I need to do? I can't close it, unless I shut down the computer.

Holy cow. Now it's working. It took 10 minutes for iTunes to ask me for the password for one of the podcasts (Japanesepod101).
Any ideas why that was the case?? I have a *lot* of podcasts from there in the queue to download... could that be why it hung up?
I've recently started using iTunes a lot, and have downloaded loads of podcasts in the past couple of days.
I powered off my iMac this afternoon because of threatening thunderstorms, and it powered back up tonight with no problem.
Everything seems to be working just fine, but I get the spinning rainbow ball when I open iTunes. It doesn't respond to Command-Q, and the menu is unresponsive.
Firefox, Safari, Thunderbird, NeoOffice and iChat all opened normally, so I think the problem is limited to iTunes.
There is no kind of error message of any kind.
I've never done any kind of re-install on a Mac, and I don't have a backup of iTunes (waiting on my iPod).
What do I need to do? I can't close it, unless I shut down the computer.
Holy cow. Now it's working. It took 10 minutes for iTunes to ask me for the password for one of the podcasts (Japanesepod101).
Any ideas why that was the case?? I have a *lot* of podcasts from there in the queue to download... could that be why it hung up?