ITunes Match sometimes skips / plays songs with exclamation marks

Using iTunes Match (v10.5.3) from my MacBook (OS X 10.6.8) I synched about 60G of music located on an external hard drive connected to my home-based AirPort Extreme base station into Apple's cloud. It works great from my iPhone and the iMac in my remote office, but occasionally when I connect with my MacBook I get these confounding exclamation marks between the song list number and the selection check box.
When this happens and I attempt to play a song with an exclamation mark sometimes iTunes prompts me to connect to the hard drive connected to the Airport and when I don't the exlamation points appear. Other times I can play the songs, but only if I individually select them; otherwise it skips all the songs with exclamation marks until it finds a local song (or recording) (i.e. without an exclamation mark).
Sometimes restarting iTunes gets rid of the exclamation marks, sometimes it doesn't. I've noticed that I often have this problem when I upload new music to the Airport-connected hard drive. But sometimes it happens without me uploading.
Through trial and error I'm starting to get a sense of what's happening but it still feels kind of arbitrary. Can someone explain what's happening?
Many thanks in advance.

The problem is that iTunes thinks the external HDD is not connected so it can't find the actual song files. So the problem you need to solve is why is the external HDD not connected.

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I keep an external drive for iTunes. When I reinstalled iTunes and pointed it to that drive, it imported my playlists, but the songs have exclamation marks. When I click on a song a window pops up asking if I want to locate that list; then the beachball kicks in and I have to perform a force quit.
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to take care of dupes:
_*How to find and remove duplicate items in your iTunes library*_
or [_*Araxis Find Duplicate Files*_|http://www.araxis.com/find-duplicate-files> (free trial)
or [Dupin|http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/dupin.php] (commercial).
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ITunes Match sometimes skips / plays songs with exclamation marks

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