Lost playlists and artwork

When I opened iTunes today I thought something was strange as it led me through set-up questions. I answered them all thinking this might be due to the newest software version I installed recently.
Then I noticed it was reloading all my music again, all 87 GB which took quite a long time. But when this had finished there were none of my playlists and none of the album artwork I had copied and pasted independently of iTunes.
I see there's some instructions about reloading iTunes again (copy to desktop etc) but I'm a little confused (as I have already reloaded the library as above)and there's no mention of artwork I can find.
I see from the root files I have a folder called iTunes music, another one called album artwork and another one called previous iTunes libraries in which there are 6 different .itl files of which 2 are related to itunes 4 and the other 4 are dated.
Any help much appreciated
Thank you

Happened to me thrice in the last month. :-|
I keep all my music in the My Music folder under my user name, so it's not really a big deal, but running set up all over again erases my preferences for playing music videos etc. Really irritating.
Furthermore, the Temporary Playlists under My Music just keep going up and so do the files in the "Old Playlists" folder. I'm not sure I want to play garbage man every few weeks on the folders that iTunes is supposed to be taking care of.

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Message was edited by: volski25

So it's only music/movies/etc. you have purchased from itunes that is supposedly missing? Where are you "looking" for the music at. What is all my playlists? playlists you have created, or the default playlists itunes comes installed with. Your going to have to be a little more descriptive. What were you doing at the time itunes supposedly lost the music.

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Hi,
New to forum and urgently need a really experienced person to help with this.
I recently upgraded to Windows 8 and have had no end of problems with my computer since. Anyway, have restored most files but my iTunes has been playing up BIG TIME! Have un-installed / re-installed / un-installed again and so forth...
Having thought I had lost all of my files (even after backing up!) I managed to finally restore everything today (after nearly a week of perserverence) including losing all of my playlists (which I somehow manged to find of sorts...some tracks missing from own compiliations for some reason??)
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