Unfortunately, I'm apparently not enough of a "tech enthusiast" either, and can't help with your specific issue, but I can commiserate.  I have an AppleTV that has a slideshow screensaver that loads photos from iTunes and shows them on the TV.  When the screensaver turned on, my media HDD (all programs including iTunes on a SSD) would just get thrashed the entire time.  Long story short, iTunes is a terribly written program.  They keep adding features but have trouble getting the existing bits to work.  I like the interface and the AppleTV has very high WAF, but otherwise it's a turd of code.