For some seemingly unknown reason tonight my copy of iTunes decided to start displaying the following “Saving iTunes Library” dialog whenever I quit the application.

The dialog would only be there for a few seconds but would make my PC completely unresponsive while it did its thing.

I remembered I had experienced this issue before but couldn’t find the site I’d originally found the solution on. A lot of searching later I found this thread on iLounge containing the solution — Exclude your iTunes folder from your Antivirus program’s active scanning.

I realised after this that I had just done a fresh reinstall of my antivirus program, NOD32, to fix another issue and in doing this had cleared out all my previous settings. Adding my iTunes folder to its exclusions list again worked a treat.