ITunes unable to locate my music

iTunes has been periodically doing this weird thing: it loses track of my music. The music files are on my computer, their names appear in iTunes, but when I click on some songs a window pops up that says "The song "blah blah blah" could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?". Then I locate the song and it plays just fine. But every now and then I have to help my computer re-locate all my music, which is really annoying and takes a lot of time. Is there something I can do to avoid this from happening?
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4)  

The most common cause of iTunes loosing links with the songs, is moving them around in the Finder.
If you don't move songs around, repair the disk using Disk Utility. If there are errors found, that could be the cause.
To repair the startup volume, you have to run disk Utility from the first OS X install CD/DVD.
M

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