Changed laptops, now iTunes can't find my music on my file server

Ok, here's what happened when I recently switched laptops
- I use iTunes to point to the music I store on my file server via a network share (WinXP)
- I manually manage my iTunes folders
- I took the \My Documents\My Music\iTunes directory from my old laptop and copied it to the same location to my new laptop
- Installed iTunes 9 on the new laptop
- When iTunes9 loaded on the new laptop ALMOST all music files in my library loaded with an exclamation point indicating that it couldn't locate the file (even though the file locations never changed)
Ok... so here's the problem. I have over 20,000 songs with ratings information and if I just re-add all the files from the network share to the iTunes library again then it looks like I'd lose those ratings.
The only way that I can see to fix things is to individually point iTunes to the network share location of the file for each file... YUCK!
Is there a script or something I can write to tell it to find these files, or at least copy the ID3 tags to the duplicated songs that I re-added from the network share.
Any help is GREATLY appreciated!

Something is different in the paths to the files....hence itunes cannot find them.
Sound like you know about the ITL file, which is why you copied it over.
What you can do is look in its companion XML file to see the paths itunes thinks it should be using.
If your XML is really big, open it using WordPad instead of NotePad. About the 10th line down is the itunes preference setting for the itunes folder:
key>Music Folder</key><string>file://localhost/K:/iTunes%20Music/</string>
On my system it's K:/iTunes Music
The %20 just indicates a space.
Then each song will have its own path
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/K:/iTunes%20Music/Cowboy%20Junkies/The%20Trinity%20Session/07%2 0200%20More%20Miles.mp3</string>
Now....can you see ANYTHING funny in one of those song paths?Is there an extra space, a different user name, anything different than what you could browse to in Windows Explorer?

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