ITunes Library is not valid??  Someone please help!

My computer froze up last night and I had to restart it. Just now I tried to open up iTunes since it froze last night and now I got a popup that says my iTunes Library is not valid and that it needs to create a new one that says "iTunes Library (Damaged)".
When iTunes opened up none of my songs were there and neither were any of my playlists. It's as if I am using iTunes again for the first time and I have no songs or anything.
How do I get those songs and my playlists back exactly the way they were before? If anyone can help me out here it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Dual 1.8GHz G5   Mac OS X (10.4.1)  

Did you try a permissions repair using your old library file? That may solve the problem without a lot of trouble.
You can re-import all of your song files back into iTunes, but you will lose all your settings and playlists. I would do that only as a last resort.
You can find out which files are different between the backup and main Music folders. If you have the OS X Developer Tools installed you can use the "File Merge" utility to compare the two folders. It can be found in Developer/Applications/Utilities. It can tell you what files are identical, unique to one folder or the other, and files that have been added or deleted to either. Depending on how big the folders are it can take a very long time to run the comparison. You might want to run it when you are not using the computer, like overnight.
After you find out which files are different in the newer Music Folder you can then just re-import them only without affecting things since the last backup.
Also, iTunes will use whatever library file was last used until you change it by holding down the option key add selecting a new one when you start iTunes. So any files that are added will be added to the current library file in use.
Hope this helps. Let me know.

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