ITunes thinks songs are missing when they are NOT...

I've written about this in the past and I thought I had fixed it manually. For some reason a large number of my songs (about 1300) in iTunes are not able to be found on the drive when I try to play them. Once I try to play them I get an error message saying "The song "song name" could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it" and then the "!" symbol shows up next to the song. The songs files ARE there though.
In the past I thought I solved this problem because I "re-added" using all the songs in my library (about 4500) "File->Add To Library". If the song was one of these "missing" songs it was re-added to the library. The songs that were not "missing" were not re-added. (and again, the song files iTunes is re-adding are the exact song files it is saying aren't there in the first place) After the "re-add" I essentially had two of all the missing songs. One with the "!" and one without it. The newly added songs did not have any of the stats the original song had. So I used a script I was told about that goes through and syncs the song's statistics. Then after the song stats were synced I removed the "!" song from the library. I had to do this one song at a time. Of course, this took a VERY long time and I don't really want to go through it again... especially now that I know it may not be a permanent fix anyway!
However here is something new I noticed now that I have Leopard: The files that are showing up as missing are also the ones that don't have a "thumbnail" icon of the album cover in the finder. Also, if I go into coverflow view in the finder those files don't have the album as the other files do. However, there should be no differences between the files. For example, one album where each song was ripped at the same time in the same way will have some songs that have the cover icon and some that don't.
As I reported last time, this is not specific to one machine and has noting to do with the drive the songs are on. This also was happening on both 10.5.1. and 10.4.11 and lower.
So, why is this happening and how can it be fixed. I'm not going to re-import the songs because then I loose all my stats, ratings, etc and have to re-do the long method of fixin the stats.. There needs to be some way to permanently fix this problem. Is it with the song files or the library? Is there some sort of validation script that can be run?
Oh, on a side note... pre-leopard the "!" would show all the time. Now, if I close iTunes and re-open the "!" are gone until I try to play the song that should have the "!". This makes things even more challenging because I can't quit iTunes if I want to know which songs are "missing".
Jeff

I have this same issue. I use an external HD connected to an Airport Extreme Base station to store my music. On Tiger 10.4.11 iTunes created a music database just fine and found every mp3. I just installed Leopard last night and left iTunes to create its database overnight. It found every song, but there are plenty with the exclamation just as you described. If I want to play these songs I must hit "Yes" to locate the song manually. I can then play any other song with an exclamation point in that particular album, but if I go to try to play another song with an exclamation point from another album I must repeat the process again.
It's definitely a problem with Leopard as I just got my mac back from the Apple store with a replaced hard drive. I created the iTunes database in Tiger on one day, then the next decided to purchase and install Leopard. So one day passed between each instance of building the database and it worked fine on a clean install of Tiger but not on a clean install of Leopard.

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