ummm quicktime? required? automatic update? reinstalls every time. and has other shit prechecked for install every time on purpose. safari, oh okay. itunes_helper? yeah, i want to reset that from my msconfig every time. apple mobile device? just because i can turn genius off doesnt mean i want it installed. dont defend this POS. itunes sacrifices performance and features for the sake of advertising. its a fucking horrible piece of software. why would i use it when something uses less resources, has near identical features and doesnt install other resource hogging shit like Bonjour to report private info back to apple servers. try songbird.
i tried out songbird in response to this thread. and when i tested them out songbird used a lot more memory than itunes. on average a little more than 3x as much memory.
i like winAmp. iTunes' equalizer presets blow ass, and as a file manager is below average. winAmp has many many more presets and has one click file detection for new songs, very handy when you have a bunch of files to import and they're not all in the same path. WinAmp with a classic-type skin (literally millions of skins to choose from) applied only uses about 3mb of memory.
oh and redbone WMP should never, EVER be used for playing music. it's decent at playing videos, and you can use it for music, but it's completely outclassed by other programs that do it so fucking much better. it's the Jean Claude Van Damme of media players.
Winamp is excellent because it allows you to manage your music in a pretty decent variety of ways. One of my good friends is sitting on a 165 Gig collection of music; all of which lives in his tens-of-thousands-of-songs-long playlist. You can just search for the song title or band name or album you want and make a "sub" playlist on the fly and somehow this isn't retardedly slow. It's got a hell of a nice music library, and while I'd NEVER let a program manage my music collection apparently it is decent at it. It's my program of choice.
There's less resource heavy applications out there of course, but they slowly get stripped of stuff I actually use as they get less and less hoggish.