Making itunes recognise an extrenal drive as the default location always

Hi
I am really hoping someone can put me out of my itunes misery. I have been running the following set up for a while now but it is driving me crazy and if anyone has a solution, I would really like to give it a try!
I currently have itunes installed on my Macbook Pro, running 10.5.1. I have set the location of the itunes library in preferences to be my portable usb drive which is connected at the back of my time capsule. Every now and again, I remove the USB Drive and attach it directly to my laptop so that time machine will back it up and any changes I have made. I am totally paranoid about losing my Apple Losless files and it has taken me Months to get to this stage. Its still a work in progress and I have many more CDs to import. I love working this way as I can play music wirelessly to my stereo downstairs using airtunes which works great!
My problem is this. Every time my computer is restarted, I use boot camp, I use DVD Player or sometimes randomly it seems, itunes reverts to the default location for itunes, being Macintosh HD/userS/music/itunes. This means I have to go back to preferences and manually re-point the location to my external USB drive. It's not the biggest problem except it then wants to update itself and run through all of the files again every time this happens. As you can imagine, this takes quite some time with a large library and I am continually adding music and watching DVD's every day.
It's becoming a real pain each time I need to restart or perform one of the above tasks as I have to wait for itunes to update itself. Is this normal? Is it just a fact of Apple life that itunes does not work on an external drive? In which case, most people must run out of hard disc space at some point. Surely people must have better solutions in running their itunes libraries...? I am hoping some of you can share these with me.
I have tried googling this and have tried consolidating my library, (which took a week!)etc but nothing seems to solve this. What I am looking for is some advice either on running a better set up (I am sure what I am doing is probably not the best way of running itunes) or some sort of command in which I can make itunes recognise that my external drive is the default location for my library and not in the users library permanently.
Any help gratefully received. Thanks!
Samantha

No problem what so ever. I am not certain you will gain anything by it, though.

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