Deleting songs iTunes can't find

Hi, all. I've scoured Google for this, but can't find a solid answer. I just got a new PC and, when iTunes searched my music, there were about 3,000 songs it 'found' but can't locate and I wanna delete those "exclamation point" tracks.
I found the old 'smart playlist' solution (link below) and that nearly worked, but iTunes 11 won't let me delete tracks from within a smart playlist. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks!
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=14127051&postcount=6

Did you select a song then Shift Delete on the keyboard?

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nellydee wrote:
Having moved my Itunes folder to a new external hardrive and resetting where it is in preferences
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Hi, Mike-D.
I'm assuming your music files are all in one centeral location - the iTunes Music folder or what have you.
There are a few basic strategies for dealing with your unfortunate situation:
1) Telling iTunes where the lost songs are on a one by one basis.
2) Moving the songs to where iTunes thinks they are. Unfortunately, there's no way to find out where that might be.
3) Start with a new iTunes library. Regrettably, this method will lose your playlists and related information (Ratings, Play Counts, Dates Last Played, etc.).
If that's not a deal-breaker for you, delete the current entries in your Library by highlighting them - iTunes Edit menu > Select All - and then right-clicking > Delete . You remove the entries from your Library but keep the files themselves in your iTunes Music folder, again that's assuming that's where they are in the first place.
You can then add them back into your Library by selecting the iTunes Music folder in Windows Explorer and dragging it into the Library entry in the iTunes Source List (left-hand column).

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My music collection was getting too large for my internal hard drive so I changed the location of my iTunes folder to my external drive, where there was already a back up of all my music. This I create by directly copying the itunes music folder every so often. Keep itunes organised is checked. When I changed the folder location, it did updating library, then asked if I wanted to organise the folder which I did.
However now, it won't find certain tracks/albums, says the orignal file location cannot be found do I want to locate...
It appears that itunes can't find any track whose artist begins with the word THE, although they are in folders called "The...." in the correct music folder.
I just updated to the latest version of itunes.
Does anyone know what might be going on???

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I don't know what happen but oneday all my music or atleast the majority of them itunes can't find in my harddrive the names of all the song are in the library but once i click on them it take me to this screen where i have to search for them and there are not in my computer anying more....i shared my computer w/ my girlfriend so i don't know if she deleted them all by mistake somehow when she upgraded itunes.....if anyone know how i can get the back please help.....

Do what Katrina says and that will most likely fix it.
Usually, when this happens, it's because a new device has been added via USB, like even a thumb drive.
When windows boots up, it assigns drive letters to the external devices. If it does it out of order from what it used to do, that effectively changes the location of your music files.
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Deleting songs iTunes can't find

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