ITunes stalls when finding files-won't add to Library...

This started with trying to delete several duplicate files.  The cure turned out to be far worse than the disease. 
So tonight I moved all copies of all my music to another hard drive.  Then I took a backup from a few weeks and (with Carbon Copy Cloner) ONLY backed up my iTunes music folders, hoping to start fresh. 
When I open iTunes, I get that import, download or find music files screen.  If I go to add to Library nothing happens.  I select the link to search for files, and it works for anywhere from 3-20 minutes.  It gets to a point where it says "processing download.m4v" and then it stalls.  I waited over an hour once.  All you can do is force quit at that point. 
The weirder thing is I have even gone into terminal to display hidden files and there is no file with that name anywhere on my computer. 
I do have what is on my iPhone and I have it set so it won't sync.  My understanding is sync will replace my iphone with my iTunes library (which is nothing).
I thought there used to be a way to have the iPhone override the computer, or truly sync in that whatever is on one will be copied to the other.  But this is how I lost everything yesterday. 
Even if i were to throw money at this problem right now, I have no idea how to get iTunes to import anything at this point.  I have gone in and deleted the preferences, and i have zapped the pRAM. 
Any suggestions or reference much appreciated.
enzosf

I've been having the same problem on my wife's Windows XP machine and after some experimentation determined that iTunes does not like the fact that there is a space in name of the "TV Shows" folder. Since iTunes wants to put TV Shows in this folder you can't change the name but I did find a pretty simple work around. From Windows Explorer I mapped a network drive directly to the "TV Shows" folder, so instead of selecting "...\iTunes Music\TV Shows" (or some level above that) as the folder when doing a File, Add Folder to Library..., I selected n:\ (the network drive I mapped) and it worked great.
I don't understand what the issue is with the space, especially since music stored on a network drive does have this problem, but this did the trick.

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