I dislike iTunes too, but I am mostly on Mac so I think the user experience is probably somewhat smoother for me
If you are after a general kind of music player, check songbird. It's made by mozilla (the same guys who do firefox and thunderbird), so it's pretty open source and has a ton of plugins.
The main thing that annoys me about itunes is the way it manages my music library (moving files around), but I eventually got the hang of it. The new itunes is actually pretty superb with the iPhone application management and new genius features.