ITunes 11 destroyed my music library

I upgraded to iTunes 11 and it destroyed my entire music library in one fell swoop.
After the upgrade to 11, many of my mp3 files got moved to Unknown Album folders. If I looked at the files in Windows Explorer, I could see the album name, track number, and track name still in the ID3 tags. Why iTunes couldn't read them at this point is a mystery.
After some searching around, I found that iTunes apparently has some trouble with differing ID3 tag versions, and some threads suggested converting them to a newer version. I started this process, and it went through without reporting any errors. However, the failure mode for tags it can't read is apparently to DELETE THE INFORMATION THAT IS THERE. What moronic developer thought this was a good idea should be fired.
It's going to take me literally weeks to clean this up, and some of it I'm not even sure I can. Thanks Apple, you've made this experience great.

You can restore much of the look & feel of the previous version with these shortcuts:
ALT to temporarily display the menu bar
CTRL+B to show or hide the menu bar
CTRL+S to show or hide the sidebar
CTRL+/ to show or hide the status bar (won't hide for me on Win XP)
Click the magnifying glass top right and untick Search Entire Library to restore the old search behaviour
Use View > Hide <Media Kind> in the cloud or Edit > Preferences > Store and untick Show iTunes in the cloud purchases to hide the cloud items. The second method eliminates the cloud status column (and may let iTunes start up more quickly)
If you don't like having different coloured text & background when you access each album use Edit > Preferences > General and untick Use custom colours for open albums, movies, etc..
Should you feel the need to roll back to iTunes 10.7 first download a copy of the 32 bit installer or 64 bit installer as appropriate, uninstall iTunes and supporting software, i.e. Apple Application Support & Apple Mobile Device Support. Reboot. Restore the pre-upgrade version of your library database as per the diagram below, then install iTunes 10.7.
See iTunes Folder Watch for a tool to scan the media folder and catch up with any changes made since the backup file was created.
tt2

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From: iTunes: How to open an alternate iTunes Library file or create a new one
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ITunes 11 destroyed my music library

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