ITunes 10.6 CPU Hog Causing Overall Slowdown

I just upgraded my iTunes to 10.6. I seem to be having a different issue than most other people. My itunes opens and syncs with everything fine. However, while listening to music, iTunes randomly takes up 80%-105% of the CPU which causes my entire computer to slowdown and everything becomes choppy. eventually the music starts to get choppy and skip, so then i just have to shut down iTunes and the computer performance returns to normal. I can watch the activity monitor with iTunes running and can see the CPU stay around 5-10% and then all of a sudden spikes to around 105% and then back down and then back up to 70-80% and stays there awhile, eventually causing the choppy performance all around.

I didn't have any of these issues before the update. I have tried reinstalling itunes, repairing permissions, zapping the pram, all the usual diagnostic tricks, but i still have the same problem. with all the issues other people seem to be having, i would hope apple will release an update soon, and hopefully that will also fix my issue, but I don't see other people having this problem and was wondering if anyone know anything I could check in the meantime?

Info:
iMac (27-inch Late 2009), Mac OS X (10.7.3), 8GB RAM