My setup: 17 inch flat panel 1.25 GHz iMac, 256 Meg RAM, Kensington trackball off keyboard's USB hub,
a powered 4-port Belkin USB hub which has a Porsche drive, USB speaker emulator (pipes audio to FM transmitter) and Canon printer, and a Canon scanner plugged directly to a USB port.
However, the ONLY time any user gets this stutter and hang is when iTunes is running. No other piece of hardware
turned on or off matters.
It's pretty rare for me - maybe once every couple months.
Also worth noting that EscapePod is rendered nonfunctional as well; which could be processor crash or just failure
of the keyboard USB connection. I don't know how to tell.
It is a relief of sorts :-) to know it's not just my personal machine that has this problem.

I've just started getting this iTunes stutter problem. Mac OS X 10.3.5 / TiBook550 512MB RAM / iTunes 4.6. I have over 11,000 tracks (66GB+) on an external FireWire drive. The library has been that size for a while, but I've only started to see this problem. I've replaced the FireWire cable to the drive, thinking that it might be the culprit. iTunes still stutters on different tracks. There doesn't appear to be any means to interrupt it except the 30-second-power-button-reboot-to-the-head. I have completely rebuilt the iTunes library file (trashed the old and reimported all 60+GB again) to no avail.

I've said many times USB isn't at all what is affecting me. I don't often use my external mouse (which requires no drivers) with my 12" PowerBook Rev A. I do have a large library, about 60GB, and iTunes seems to be busy writing to it at the time of the freeze, I have an external firewire drive but do not have the library on it. Hard drive space doesn't seem to be an issue either, I regularly have less than 500MB of free space and have not experienced it with this amount of free space, usually only with more than 2GBs of free space. Perhaps this is why it's been a while since my last freeze.

I wish Apple would acknowledge this problem and find the cause, I'm still interested to know whether than person who had their logic board replaced has experienced any problems. I have a feeling this is a hardware issue, the CPU seems to short circuit in some way or something.

I too have had these problems. However I do not use iTunes. I will say that it had been getting progressively worse until I ran TechTool. Found that I had major hard drive issues. Once it ran through and fixed the problems, I haven't had a freeze.

It is odd though that it started with the 10.3 upgrade.

I do have hard drive issues, my original 40GB had some problems, but they're been worse since I replaced it with a 80GB Toshiba 5400RPM drive. It also gets noisy sometimes, maybe I should get it replaced. I've experienced data loss and have had to erase the drive before and I get all kinds of crashes and freezes and kernal panics, maybe I've got bad RAM.

I am glad that I have finally found this thread concerning this very "stuttering" problem...

In the past, probably since 10.2, I have been having this issue, though VERY ocassionally that I never bothered to troubleshoot.

However, ever since I added the 4G iPod to my setup (last week) this problem has been coming literally once every 2 hours or so... this is killing me. I also have a somehow complicated hardware chain going on here so I was quite frustrated as to what was causing it... Because the problem went back up with the iPod I thought it must be the Firewire causing it, and I have an iBook G3 600, a LaCie 120 FWHD plugged in the iBook's FW port, and the iPod daisy chained to it. But from reading this thread I am sure FW isnt the source.

USB; I have a 7 port hub and constantly almost full. Very hard to pin down, I have tried to unplug most and I have come to a conclusion:

1) the freeze only ever happens when iTunes is playing music;
2) only when USB hub is plugged;
3) only when SoundSticks is in used

I honestly haven't tried enough combination of config to yield anything accurate, but reading this thread seems to at least confirms the iTunes part and perhaps USB related.

I also haven't come up with any immediate solution that would seemingly solve the problem, like some of the posters suggested. I hope I am at least contributing to the data of the problem... as I am not really helping much. I will keep following this thread, thanks for all you guys information too.

iTunes is not the culprit for me. I never freeze with it playing. Literally never.

I use not USB devices. Period. I use Bluetooth stuff (the built-in bluetooth in my laptop is on the USB secition of the board inside there, but I never freeze using my mouse or keyboard).

The only thing in common with all of my freezes is that I have mail as the fore-application.

I really think Mail is the culprit or mail-appetizer...
I uninstalled mail-appetizer so we will see how that goes...

SIGH...

ok just to update everyone (glad to see this thread is still going strong ) i've replaced my usb mouse with bluetooth and still experienced the problem at least once a day. i had a thing called 'keepsoundawake' on my computer as a fix for an audio problem i was having with my pb17 (1gig) which i've removed and seems to have alleviated the problem somewhat.

so, again, playing the waiting game. no definitive answers or anything. it also appears that not having any usb devices plugged in at all (from start up) helps.

People keep talking about iTunes and non-Apple USB devices, but I am using neither
(nothing in the library) and started getting the stuttering this week.

Graphite G4 400Mhz, 384M ram, 10.3.5, 4G free on the system drive
(I don't think Command-I includes swap space being used).

It froze. Tried going to another machine (iMac), it had frozen (was sharing a drive off the G4,
an external firewire drive), so I couldn't ssh in to see what was going on. Re-booted the iMac
and the G4 woke up. My console log has the same kernel: overflow and LLEventQueue messages.

I read somewhere else that the real problem is hidden inside the kernel: overflow message,
and the LLEventQueue messages were just the queued keyboard and mouse events being handled
after the freeze, which makes sense.

What I did change this week was installing Office 2004. And Word was left running for two days
before the freeze. Seems to point to running out of memory or swap.

I'm going to try using Cocktail to clear out all the caches a couple of times a day to see if that
holds off the stutter.

jimmy

I seem to be freezing as well, but it is not related to iTunes or USB or free disk space.

It might be related to Mail. I installed 2GB of RAM and menu meters says I have 0MB swap file (0 virtual memory) so my system is running great, but I seem to still get freezes. I ran the hardware test, nothing. I repaired the HD from the CD, it found an error so I repaired again and no errors.

I restarted, froze immediately.
A tear came to my eye.

Restarted again, writing this after about 20 minutes.

I have tried now to not use Mail except to just check, write, and then close.

I don't prefer this method, but I will keep you guys updated as to how this goes.

It's sad when Maya runs better than Mail.