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iTunes is terrible, on Windows 7 at least. Type in 'why is iTunes' in Google and look at its suggestions, you can see lots of people have a low opinion of it! I have never used such slow and unresponsive software. Like you said I can only assume they deliberately cripple the Windows version.
 
itunes is like everybody says in windows, substandard piece of software, but my guess is that apple, even if it works ok on macs, will do something in the future with this program since it was initially conceived as a music on line store and now it has so many things and code added that it's functionality is really compromised.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Mine isn't that bad. The speed is reasonable for me once it loads.
 
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