My whole iTunes library is lost! Help!

Hello. After not checking my computer for two days I relaized last night that my iTunes library has been completely deleted - all my playlists, songs (both those songs purchased and my own CD burns) are gone. When opening iTunes, it behaved as if it was newly installed or reset - it had their generic playlists and the 10 free songs they give.
The events leading up to this are as follows: In December, I went to purchase some songs from the iTunes Music Store. Before it would allow me to download the songs, I had to upgrade iTunes. I upgraded, downloaded the songs, restarted the computer... all was fine. No problems for the past month.
Last week, I was downloading some pictures from my digital camera and (thoughtlessly) disconnected the camera from my computer without shutting off the camera first. The camera gave a brief error message (don't remember what it said), but seems to have cleared itself up.
I turn on my computer this weekend for the first time since downloading those few pictures and first thing I notice is that my preferences are gone - the screensaver, background, colors, file organization seems to have defaulted back to factory settings.
After checking that my documents were still there (yes, thank god), I opened iTunes and that is when I found that the whole program seems to have defaulted back to its generic settings.
What happened!? I thought iTunes may have been affected when I disconnected my digital camera prematurely, but after reading some of the current discussions, could this have been a result (albeit with a one-month delay) of the new iTunes upgrade?
FYI - I did run a file search for all music files on my computer and nothing was found except for the 10 free iTunes songs and the sound files for the generic computer sounds/noises. My iTunes library of songs wasn't in my trash or anywhere - it has completely vanished.
Any thoughts on this problem would be greatly appreciated. I've pretty much resigned myself to having to reload my whole music collection, but is there any recourse I could pursue to get the pruchased music that I lost?
Thanks. I appreciate your reading of this lengthy post.
Dell   Windows XP  
Dell   Windows XP  
Dell   Windows XP  
Dell   Windows XP  
Dell   Windows XP  

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