ITunes Plus and Cloud Download Problem

Question

Having some significant problems with iTunes today.  It all started when I decided to pull the trigger on the iTunes plus upgrade of all my music that had been purchased prior to the change to DRM-free music on iTunes.  Given the unusual amount of the charge, my credit company declined it and called me.  I told them it was me trying to make the charge, so they cleared the security freeze.  Shortly thereafter, I got an e-mail from Apple stating there was a problem with my payment method and gave me a link to click on to review my payment information.  I updated the payment information, entering the same credit card information and figured I was good to go.
Now, I seem to have two problems.  One, when I click on the iTunes plus upgrade in the iTunes store, it says my upgrade is processing and I will receive an e-mail once it is ready - seems odd, because the e-mail I got when the credit card was declined said I would need to do the iTunes plus upgrade again.
The other problem I am having, which, in my opinion is way more significant, is that I cannot download any of my previously purchased songs from the cloud in iTunes, on my iPad 2, or on my iPhone 4S.  When I try to downloan something, I get an error stating that the song cannot be downloaded because it was not purchased with my Apple ID.  I have only ever had one Apple ID, so this doesn't make any sense to me at all.
I e-mailed iTunes support and tried to explain this, so maybe they will be able to help, but if anyone has any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.

Answer 1

When you upgrade your songs to Plus in iTunes, it doesn't download them. Instead, they do some behind the scenes processing and tell you that they will send you an email when the music is ready to be downloaded. Among other things, the behind the scenes processing is that they embed your name and some other info into each song so that it can be traced who spread some music around should it start showing up in p2p services and the like.
You get an email later saying your music is ready, and that email contains a link to a WebObjects object on the Apple site. I'm too old to bring up a local sniffing proxy to watch the traffic pass back and forth, but they're most likely expecting that iTunes has registered itself to handle some document or MIME type with the browser, and the response from the WebObjects URL contains that magic type, which the browser is then supposed to hand over to iTunes. iTunes sees that certain something in the response, and then starts downloading your easter egged music and replacing the old music with the new.
Life is good, the customer is happily jamming to 256kbps instead of that lousy 128kbps, and all us law abiding citizens never even think of looking inside the newly downloaded files to find our names buried within them. And, because the web is so ubiquitous, most of us never know why clicking on that email brought up a browser window for a brief period of time before iTunes did our bidding.
//John