I don't understand. What's taxing the processor on a sync? I'm just talking about a normal backup and sync where little if any media is being transferred. We're talking maybe one minute, max.
if your using windows, try reformatting and re-installing windows from scratch. thats what i did and it helped tremondusly with performance using itunes. Just be sure to back everything up.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-gb; GT-P1000 Build/FROYO) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)
Are you using the feature where it reconverts music to 128kbps? That would cause a spike in cpu usage if the odd song was being converted then synced.
iTunes is kind of like the Mafia.
The fewer questions you ask about how it works, the happier you'll be.