iTunes 7 problems

It seems just about everyone is reporting iTunes 7 problems. (That hyperlink is to Google's search results on the string "iTunes 7 problems". When I pulled that up a minute ago, it was just short of 1,000 results.) I installed it a couple of days ago on my Windows XP machine, and while I was initially quite impressed (you've got to admit, the CoverFlow eye candy is nice), I'll add two observations:
  1. You can now download cover art for your existing music from the iTunes Store. (You always got the cover art when you purchased something from the iTunes Store, and you could always manually add it to tracks or albums yourself. By far the bulk of my music is ripped from my own CD collection, so it has no cover art at all.) Firstly, doing this at all is not completely intuitive. You can right click a single track, or group of tracks, and select "Get Album Artwork"—that's straightforward enough. You can also apparently select Advanced > Get Album Artwork from the application menu to download cover art for your entire collection. Doing that gives no feedback, though. It's not at all obvious that iTunes is doing anything at all, and it only became clear later on when a whole lot of new cover art turned up in my collection. Secondly, unless I'm mistaken, the newly downloaded cover art doesn't get transferred to your iPod for display on-screen during track playback. Cover art from iTunes Store-purchased tracks, and manually added art both get transferred to your iPod. If there's a preference or option to achieve this, I can't find it.
  2. iTunes 7 seems acutely sensitive to system load during playback. Last week I was using iTunes 6 to play background music while playing EVE Online with no problems. This week, iTunes 7 chops horrendously through tracks as soon as I fire up EVE. It's unusable. (I'd quote my system specs if I thought they were relevant, but I don't. iTunes 6 didn't have a problem.)
I hope I'm just missing something with the cover art issue. I hope there's an update released real soon now for iTunes 7's inability to keep up under modest system load.

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