Reigning in Some of the iTunes Bloat

I use iTunes almost strictly for listening to podcasts, even though I own a Zune, because it lets me group my podcasts into smart playlists (even if it's an inelegant solution). So, I have no use for the iPodService that starts up every time you run iTunes. In fact, even if you disable that service from within services.msc, iTunes will reset its status to Manual and re-open the service. That's very annoying and smacks of malware behavior. So, the easiest way to disable this in Windows XP is:

1. Press WindowsKey + R to get to the Run menu.
2. Type services.msc and hit Enter.
3. In the main pane of the services window, scroll down until you find iPodService.
4. Double-click that, and click the Stop button.
5. Then change the Startup type to Disabled.
6. Close services.msc.
7. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\iPod\bin\
8. Change the extension of iPodService.exe to something else. I changed mine to iPodService.dontrun. If you don't see an extension, you'll have to enable it within Windows Folder Settings.
9. Create a blank text file and name it iPodService.exe.

If you were to just delete iPodService, iTunes would only re-install it the next time it is run. In this case, iTunes sees that the file it wants to run is there, doesn't reset the service state, and probably tries to run the fake executable. I'm not to sure on that last one, but the end result is you don't get iPodService running in the background. All bets are off on the next update.

You can perform this same trick on other iTunes processes that you don't need. For example, I also disable iTunesHelper (located in the iTunes install directory). If you like to re-organize your music collection in a program other than iTunes, you should leave this running as it keeps the music data in sync. If you do all of your adjustments within iTunes, then this process is useless. I can't guarantee that replacing any other process won't trigger a re-install.

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