ITunes jumbo sizes my Music Folder - copies every song twice!

*Here is my problem:*
Three days ago I had 70+ GB free on my 500GB internal hard drive. Today I have 3.62 GB free. I believe that iTunes is at fault.
*Here is what happened:*
I was lounging around my apartment with iTunes playing after having just upgraded to version 7.4.0. When I came back to my iMac, I had two alerts on my screen saying that my hard disk was full. (Screenshots available on my .Mac page at <http://homepage.mac.com/mk2ja/Sites/DiskFull/>.)
In my iTunes Library, it shows that I have 16.65 GB worth of music. But when I go to my Music Folder, it shows that I have 70 GB of music files. "How can this be?" I asked. Well, it turns out that SOMEHOW nearly every one of my songs has been copied and renamed back into the same folder.
For example -
A song in the folder +username > Music > iTunes > iTunes Music > The Beatles > Greatest Hits 1962-1970 > Hey Jude.m4a+ now also has sisters named +Hey Jude 1.m4a+ and +01 Hey Jude.m4a+.
In this true-to-life example, the album that contains only 25 songs in my Library has 74 songs, yes, SEVENTY FOUR songs, when shown in the Music Folder. So what should be only 68.3 MB is actually 202.3 MB on disk.
I have regained about 3 GB of my space by going through my Library, song by song, and making sure it only occurs once in my Music Folder, but I still have thousands of songs left to go through. And it *****.
Now, to be completely honest, I have noticed this phenomenon before. I have known that several albums' folders were housing duplicates, and I had been slowly working my way through correcting them all when I had time. But the sudden loss of about 70 GB and crippled me completely is just really ticking me off. This is like the last straw after having a bad week with iTunes already... first, album artwork started randomly disappearing. Then, if iTunes was paused while I went to class, it would have to be Quit and reopened before I could play again. And it jumbo sized my Music folder?? Come on! What ever happened to "It just works"!? Ah!
So...
If somebody could let me know WHY iTunes hates me, and what I can do to fix it. Please, that'd be great.
If anybody from Apple who works in iTunes reads this, could you please work on making iTunes NOT do this in future? This isn't the first time it has copied my Library, as I mentioned above.
Thanks for your time.
And please.. tell me how to make it stop!

First off, I am still trying to figure out why iTunes copied all the songs in my Library, as I described previously.
However, I seem to have finally found the culprit of my lost disk space. After approximately six weeks of going through tons of files, I finally came across a file of the same size as the space I had lost before: theHardDrive/Library/Logs/Console/501/console.log.5 was a 76.71 GB file. Yes, you read that correctly - 76 gigs! I just deleted the entire 501/ folder and now I have regained all that missing space, for which I am elated.
But can somebody tell me why the heck iTunes thinks it needs to copy those files?! I'm glad it wasn't iTunes that caused that particular instance of missing space, but I have nonetheless been deleting unnecessary copies of songs for all these past six weeks to regain some of that space bit by bit (or byte by byte, if you will). And I know that there are still extraneous copies for probably more than half of the remaining songs in my collection.
All for now...
mk2ja

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