iTunes 100% CPU on Exit

So I haven’t been able to use iTunes in windows for a while now. When I exited the program it would lockup the CPU at 100%, causing me to force quit the process several times before it finally died. This was happening both using an older version from a while ago and the current version (as of writing) 7.6.x.

I decided to do a little hunting around the web to see if I could find anyone else having a similar problem. Here is the article that caused me to think it was something to do with NOD32. It didn’t completely solve my problem, but got me headed on the right path.

iTunes taking 100% of CPU when playing!

… as soon as I monitored I saw that it was the NOD32 file monitor (amon.sys) that was causing the problem – shutting it down makes the problem go away. Strange thing is that on both my laptop and my HTPC I have the NOD32 file monitor running and it has no problem with AMON.SYS and iTunes.

I tried adding the iTunes folder to AMON, but that didn’t work. What did work was adding the iTunes.exe to the Exclusions list of the NOD32 IMON scanner. What was happening was NOD32 was blocking iTunes attempts at communicating with the Steve Jobs Mothership. Apparently uploading your listening preferences to iTunes is so important if your blocking its attempts to phone home it won’t close properly. Well fine then upload all you want, at least its working again.

How to Fix it:
Open NOD32 > IMON > Miscellaneous Tab > Exclusion: Edit > Add button (Find iTunes.exe)