Spent a lot of time on the net trying to figure out the problem with my iTunes and could not find it. I thought I should post it here in case this comes up on anyones setup.
I had a hard time getting iTunes to start up on my nLited Win XP Pro. Turns out that iTunes (version 8 at least) requires smart card Dlls.
I used Filemon to monitor the missing DLLs that iTunes was calling and I ended up having to copy the following DLLs to the windows\system32 folder:
sccbase.dll
sccsccp.dll
slbcsp.dll
slbiop.dll
slbrccsp.dll