Mac is rerouting iTunes files to trash

My iTunes library seems to be self-destructing. I first noticed that some of the music would not play, and got an error message that the file no longer exists. The message asks if I would like my computer to locate it. I could not find the music anywhere.
After reading a few other forums here, I looked up the info for the songs that were not playing. The info shows that the file has been routed to the trash.
As I work to try to restore my music, I notice more and more of the songs are being marked this way. Everytime I open my library, more songs are gone.
I have already tried to find them in the trash, but since my library has over 3,500 songs, it would be incredibly tedious to manually move the songs back to my itunes.
When I tried to use time machine to restore my entire library, the time machine itunes looked exactly like the one I have now, instead of they way it was during the date of the backup.
My music consists of songs and albums purchased through iTunes, CD's,and mp3 files digitized from vinyl. The problem seems to be attacking songs indiscriminately no matter the source. When I called iTunes for support, they assured me that I could simply download the purchased items from my accounts. Well, that covers about 50 of the 3,500 songs.
All of my files were legally purchased and I cannot understand why iTunes seems to be renaming the file paths to the trash for me.
Can anyone help?

Also - I see the forum is automatically labeling my computer as a MacBook, 13 inch from early 2008. That sounds like the computer I bought for my son. This computer, the one I am talking about is an IMac, Intel core, running Mac OSX 10.6.8.

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Mac is rerouting iTunes files to trash

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