ITunes 7.1 has changed how my music files are organised - why?

Question

My preference is to store all the music on my PC underneath iTunes, thus:
My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\{artist}\{album}
I do not purchase music from the iTunes store (there hasn't been one in my country until very recently) but I do import CDs from my own collection, and also mp3 files which I obtain (legally) from other sources such as emusic.
I have had the "keep iTunes music folder organised" and "copy files to iTunes music folder" preferences checked. To avoid duplication, when I have new tracks to add to my library I move them into a 'New Imports' folder inside 'iTunes Music' and then invoke "File > Add Folder to Library" in iTunes.
Id tags in these mp3 files are not always consistent w.r.t. artist names, so I often have to select a few tracks, and edit the info so that the artist/album names are standard. When I do this the files are physically moved into the correct folder (and so I have one "Beethoven, Ludwig van" folder, rather than the dozen or so variations on that name which have been imported, and the other now-empty folders have been deleted).
So far so good - up until the latest iTunes upgrade, that is.
It appears that this version has changed the way iTunes operates, and it now uses the "Album Artist" field in preference to the "Artist" field. Actually that can't be strictly true, there must be other factors at work too: this afternoon I imported an album with 33 tracks; the album artist was empty while the artist was spelt in two different ways. I selected all the tracks in iTunes-Music and used "Get Info" to give all 33 tracks the same artist; the result moved 32 tracks into one folder (named as "artist") and left track 23 in its original folder. I then selected track 23 alone and checked the artist and album artist fields, and the result moved the other 32 tracks into the same folder as track 23 (named as "album artist").
What's going on? A "what's new in iTunes 7.1" document would probably be useful but if Apple have released one I can't find it.
Cheers
T

Answer 1

iTunes keeps no memory of the previous folders things were in so no obvious way to reverse the change. iTunes shouldn't move your files about if that option isn't ticked except if you use the option File > Library > Organize Library > Rearrange files in the folder "iTunes Media" (or you "consolidated", in which case the originals would still be in place). If it's not that then I've no idea why it did what it did. Ideally you would have a backup to recover from such a situation.
If your files are all correctly tagged with their respective genres so that it is easy to identify "audiobooks", "teaching", "study" etc. within iTunes then you could modify my script ConsolidateByMoving to move selected files to precisely where you want them.
tt2