ITunes Match problems with new PC

Question

I have around 25,000 songs that were mostly matched, some uploaded, when I first signed up for iCloud on my previous laptop (64 bit Windows 7 Pro). My iTunes library resided on an external USB drive and iCloud/iTunes Match was mostly working, though I still had some problems with duplicate songs that I had hoped iTunes Match would be smart enough to help me eliminate (it's not). Duplicates came mostly from several earlier attempts to move and clean up my iTunes library, but that's another story...
Anyway, I got a new laptop (previous one died, hard disk failed), on which I installed iTunes, which I set up with the same external hard drive holding the iTunes library. So the music files were the same. Had to import all the songs from the hard drive which was set up to hold my iTunes Library. The trouble is, iTunes Match apparently thinks I am trying to add 25,000 more songs, when in fact they are the same songs as before. How can I tell it this? When I run iTunes match it says I already have the maximum 25,000 songs, and all the songs in iTunes show up as an error. I can't delete them from iCloud because I can't see them in iTunes! The other laptop is gone. There is apparently no independent way to access iCloud-based music except through iTunes.
I just realized that this is probably the problem: since the previous laptop hard drive died, whatever secret info Apple stores to identify it as authorized for my iTunes account was lost, and I had no chance to deauthorize it. So it thinks I am trying to match a new set of 25,000 songs (though these are almost all the same songs as before, so I would think iTunes Match could figure this out, but I guess not). I decided to deauthorize all 5 PC's on my account - but I can't do this until March 13, 2013, because I apparently did this last March, no doubt to solve another iTunes problem (seems to happen at least once a year that something in iTunes gets screwed up).
I sent Apple a request to deauthorize the dead PC (or all of them if they will), but does anyone have any alternate suggestions? I would like to be able to remove non-needed and/or duplicate songs from iCloud, and apparently the only way to do this is to delete them from iTunes (locally), in which case you are supposed to get a prompt to remove from iCloud or not. But all my songs are flagged as "error" in the iCloud status column, so I have no way to see or modify what's out there, since the associated PC is dead.
I also have most of these ~25K songs on Google Music and in Amazon Cloud. So I'm considering just dumping iCloud and using iTunes locally only (though I'm afraid if I do that it will delete all my local iTunes songs - guess I would have to reinstall from a backup in that case). When iTunes Match works, it's very nice and automatic and convenient since I listen to music on iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad (yes, I drank Steve's Kool-ade). But as with many things Apple, when it DOESN'T work, it makes you want to slit your wrists. LOL (not).
Thanks,for any advice.
-Bruce

Answer 1

Thanks bmw249. I have good news and bad news. Good news: Apple very quickly deauthorized my computers so I was able to drop the lost computer that was taking up a slot and (I suspected) confusing iTunes Match.
The bad news is that this didn't make any difference. Nearly all the songs in my iTunes library have an iCloud status of "error" and when I turn on iTunes Match, it churns for a while before telling me that I already have 25,000 songs in the cloud and can't add any more. What I expected is for it to recognize that most of the 25K songs are the very same ones sitting in this local iTunes library. It should be substantially fewer than 25K because I also deleted 1000+ classical music pieces that I have sitting in Amazon Cloud, in hopes of freeing up space for my recently purchased and created music to be uploaded to iCloud. But no dice.
I am now downloading ~800 songs that iTunes thinks I have only on iCloud. I then plan to figure out how to deactivate iCloud and iTunes Match on this PC so that nothing will be deleted locally when I cancel my iCloud account (it runs out in March 2013 but I assume I can cancel and deactivate the account sooner). The "convenience" of this service isn't worth the many dozens of hours of hours I have spent trying to get it to work the way Apple says it works. Amazon Cloud (also costing ~$25 a year) has a limit of something like 20 GB and no specific limit on number of songs. I buy most music there anyway and have already uploaded most of the rest, so this makes the most sense. I really like the way iTunes Match can (in theory) keep all my music sync'd and smoothly stream to my iPhone even over 3G. Amazon Cloud takes a bit more effort but does much the same thing.
Thanks for listening. I'm assuming this is a "moderated" forum and that this post will soon be removed for my Amazon comments.