Best ways to restore iTunes?

I admit, I don't spend much times using iTunes. I have about 300 songs I really like, they're on my iPod and IPhone. However, I recently had need to use djay, and realized that after many, many upgrades my iTunes was showing both 9,800+ songs and several thousand "dead" tracks. Deep (and painful) examination showed that since before 2006, songs have been shuffled (and then vanished), renamed (both with numerical prefixes and post fixes), most of the purchased "Amotion" album has been reduced to zero kb, except for the tracks on my iPod/iPhone; several podcasts vanished, only to reappear with slightly different names and some had even been doubled and then acquired new advertisements that are not there in the originals; anyway...
After too much grief, I now have a new separate folder with 5700 songs and podcasts that I'm pretty sure are the originals (and another with almost 3000 renamed duplicate tracks that were just wandering around inside the iTunes library unchaperoned or accounted for).
Probably unrelatedly, iTunes has taken to randomly popping open and then refusing to stay closed, even to the point of canceling shut down and requiring a forced shut down.
Adding the originals back into iTunes will presumably just increase the number of doubled songs and do nothing to clear out all the duplicates that are in the library, but apparently unremarked by the database. Deleting everything risks losing iPhone apps, authorizations, restores and other functions which may also be in there somewhere.
Are there any suggestions as to how to end up with a decent iTunes library that won't send djay screaming into the night and will sit happily on its external HD without further undue corruption?

Well, you'll need to reinstall iTunes and the iPod updater.
Did you happen to save the iTunes library file?
What are the iTunes library files?

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