A Late Jump onto the Apple Bandwagon -- A Rough Ride

When my Zune 80GB's battery started dying, I recently decided it was time I abandon my personal boycott of Apple products.  I settled on an iPod Touch that was available through AirMiles.

Unfortunately, after being pleasantly surprised for the first week of Apple ownership, the ride turned bumpy as soon as I upgraded iTunes (on Windows 7, 32-bit) to version 10.5.0.142.

The problems I immediately encountered after updating to iTunes 10.5:

• iTunes started hanging whenever it tried backing up my iPod, whether as prepping for the sync process or when right-clicking on my iPod and clicking "backup" with no sync involved.  iTunes also hanged during the backup process associated with trying to update the iPod OS to 5.0.  I once let the backup process go for 18+ hours with no movement on the progress bar, before giving up. 
• My CPU was constantly running at more that 50%, minimum, often jumping up to 100% when opening windows or programs, regardless of whether iTunes was open or my iPod was plugged in.   Apparently the villainous resource hog is "AppleMobileDeviceService.exe" which can be turned off but is required to sync.
•  The iTunes store no longer opened properly.  Even after signing in with my Apple ID, all that would appear was a blank window with "iTunes Store" on it, even after the progress bar had finished.

To cut this short, I'll save everyone from reading a poignant, heart-rending description of all the failed trials and tribulations I went through in an attempt to get everything working properly, again.

Here's what ultimately ended up working for me.  A simple, straight-forward solution I found on the internet; a solution I sincerely and vehemently wish I had discovered earlier rather than later.  It would have saved me a lot of time and useless work.

1. Open the DOS command console as an administrator.
2. Enter "netsh winsock reset".
3. Restart computer.

This is supposed to restore the Winsock catalog to its default state, to repair a corrupted Windows TCP/IP stack (not sure what that is, I'm just quoting).

Anywhoo, this completely solved all three issues I described above.