Backed up itunes music, library, now songs are missing??

Hey all,
I recently had to restore my laptop to factory specs, which meant I had to remove and re-install my itunes. I made sure before I restored it to back up all my itunes music folder and database/library files to an external hard drive. As I have over 11,000 songs in itunes (~60gb worth), this process took several hours, but I felt sure everything was backed up and I was good to go.
Wrong! When I re-installed itunes, it asked me to choose a library to use, and so I chose the location on my external hard drive, and all was fine until I unplugged it. Then it wouldn't locate any songs. So I re-imported all my songs and playlists over that were on my hard drive, but it's telling me that some songs can't be found. They should be in there but they're not. So I used a 3rd party software app to move the songs from my ipod to a folder on my computer, but they all have weird names (the way ipod organises the songs) and I don't know which song is which.
To make a long story short, after deleting and re-adding my itunes library, I now have 2-3 copies of each playlist (including the standard ones that automatically are in itunes), and 2 copies of several songs, one of which works and the other doesn't.
Since I still don't have several (possibly 100 or more) songs in my itunes that I do have on my ipod, should I just delete the whole itunes and start over?
All I really want is my itunes library back and the info like the original date added, last played, play count and ratings.
Oh, and I'm using itunes 7.5 b/c I tried 8 and didn't like it.
I really hope someone can help answer me b/c I've been unable to add any new songs to my ipod for 2 months now!

I have now resorted to uninstalling, redownloading, and reinstalling iTunes again.
That won't fix anything.
If you want everything to stay on the external...
Hold Shift and launch iTunes.
Select *Create library*.
Select a folder on the external.
iTunes will create a new iTunes folder.
Inside this folder will be a folder called "Automatically add to iTunes".
Drag all the music on the external to this folder.

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