I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Just in case you don't actually want the new iTunes Ping sidebar to open up every time you relaunch, or don't want those arrows by each song: you can't disable them within iTunes even if you don't use Ping (bad iTunes!  My trust in Apple continues to decline).  However, you can disable the sidebar (Windows and Mac instructions) and disable the arrows (Mac and Windows) with a couple of command line/terminal prompts.