Corrupt iTunes Library .XML File for library with 3,000+ playlists.HELP!

Here is my situation. I've been ripping my cds to Lossless for almost a year now and I'm at about cd 3000. A few days ago my Mini got hung up on a cd and locked up. The cd drive even completely stopped spinning after about an hour. I did the only thing I could and turned the power off. It was totally unresponsive. When I re-booted I got the "iTunes Library has been renamed (damaged) error. I tried several fixes which didn't work such as simply renaming damaged(by removing the word damaged from the file name). Right now I have dragged the Library File and the XML file to my desktop and tried to restart iTunes to import the XML file but that's giving me none of my playlists. I have a playlist for every album in my library. I like this way so no need to comment on how it doesn't make sense to you. My database file is 43MB and the XML is just a few KB. My library is stored on an external drive. I will freak out if I have to create all these playlists again. I know that there is a playlist generator app that will automatically do this but I had these all last name, first name and aliases and how I wanted to find them so I put a lot of work into how I organized everything. What else can I try?

It's so funny you just replied to this because I've been waiting patiently for a week and I just now posted another snag I'm running into right above this post.
I never really had any kind of problems with all of the playlists. It never really hung up or anything like that at all & I'm using a very first generation Mac Mini. It would seamlessly play from any song I picked to any other song I picked by just clicking on it.
I had multiple reasons for using so many playlists if you want to read about them here:
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?ddgtl&1230475284

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