If my external HD gets disconnected, iTunes reverts to my HOME directory..

.. and this has got to be the WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT CAN HAPPEN.
I discovered a few days ago that I had about 1000 dupes. lots of songs with " 1" appended to the end. Example: trees.mp3, trees 1.mp3. ITunes had attuned itself to all of the " 1" songs. It has taken me days to fix this. And I might be wrong about this, but I'm sure I had just over 5000 songs listed in my library (without the dupes) and now I have just over 4000. I have a folder full of dupes, just in case I've removed anything that I want to keep.
If my iTunes Folder Location setup in the prefs disappears because my external HD was somehow disconnected (we get lots of lightening storms here and it's not uncommon to lose power) then DO NOT DEFAULT MY ITUNES LIBRARY LOCATION TO SOMETHING ELSE, TELL ME THAT IT HAS BEEN DISCONNECTED AND THEN __DO NOTHING ELSE__.
1.42ghz mini   Mac OS X (10.4.6)   1 gb ram, 17" dell, 250 gb external

Yeah, I realize that, however the only way I could have had 1000 duplicate songs, with itunes no longer looking at the original but at the duplicates, is if iTunes messed up somehow.

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