Itunes will give you the busy thing a lot, even on very fast systems with lots of resources, so don't feel bad. And, as you discovered, command-o on a mounted drive isn't generally the approach to take to browse it's content. It works (most of the time) but when it doesn't, you get issues like the one you're describing. What you want to do, is as you have described, go to your finder's main window, hit command-shift-c for computer, then that will show all the drives on your system. Just vo to the one you want, and since you're using column mode, just vo-right arrow into the drive, and you can see it's content.
Second, once again, I'd like to point out that OSX is *not* windows, you do not need to reinstall the os everytime something breaks.
Generally, you can just find the problem, fix it, and be done with it. Very rarely is there a need to renstall the entire os.And having to do so three times since you've had the machine doesn't sound to me like issues are getting resolved.
One thing you can do to help fix the itunes issue, is to not try importing every song on the drive at once. Select a few at a time, then open those songs in itunes, when they're done, select a few more (shhift-down arrow will do this) then import those. It'll be a whole lot slower, but it won't go busy on you for hours at a time while it tries to download the artwork. Alternatively, you could go into the preferences, and tell it not to download artwork for songs, that may solve your problem as well. On osx, you get to a programs preferences by pressing command-coma (command-,) Then you can move among the different preference screens with command- right bracket (command-]) and command-left bracket. Then, when you're finished setting all your options, just close the preferences (ommand- w) and you're all set. Itunes is a nice program, but in my opinion, it's just not worth the trouble. It tries to be all things to all people, and in some cases, that just doesn't work. But, if itunes does what you want, then by all means, feel free to use it. Honestly, the only thing I use itunes for is my audible books and any real time streams I pull (which isn't very often), but others on the list use itunes for everything under the sun, and that's ok, that's why the mac is so great, anyone who wants to use something else can, and those who want to use what apple provides can, and everyone still gets their work done.
Enjoy, and hope this helps a bit.
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