ITunes is changing my iTunes Music folder location, why?

I keep my iTunes library on an external hard drive. Every so often, iTunes resets my iTunes Music folder location back to the C drive on my computer and messes everything up, including my current downloads. Does anyone know why this is happening and what I can do to stop it?

If you launch iTunes when the external drive is not mounted, iTunes will set back to the default location on the boot drive. That's expected behavior (though it would be nice if iTunes would bring up a dialog that it can't find the selected library). The cure for that is to make sure you don't launch iTunes until the volume where you keep your iTunes library is completely and clearly mounted.
If iTunes is dropping the location even though your external drive is mounted, that's clearly unexpected behavior. Post back and I'm sure folks here will be able to help further.
Regards.

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    64,00,6f,00,63,00,76,00,77,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,00,00,00
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    [-HKEYCURRENTUSER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CopyMoveTo]

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