Half of my itunes library has disappeared

All of the songs appear to be there until I click on them, then an exclamation point appears and a window pops up saying "the song could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" I cannot locate the file in finder anywhere. I tried several song titles and artist names in spotlight without any luck. Music and t.v. shows purchased from iTunes are the same as cd's burned myself. The only music left is about 18GB of stuff I just recently added. After I added this my memory was maxed out but everything has worked fine for almost a month. My ipod has most of the combined library and I have most of the missing songs backed up on an external harddrive. I searched the archive and found a couple others who have had this same problem, but no info on how to fix it.
Anybody know what may have happened?
Are there any tricks for recovering my library without having to re-import everything from external sources?
If not, how about getting the missing music off my ipod?
Thanks.

Uninstalling AVG won't repair the damage, though hopefully it should stop it happening again. See this post for repair steps.
tt2

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