Music files getting renamed (why?), iTunes loses them

This has happened once every month or two since I started using iTunes on my laptop. I haven't been able to figure out what triggers it, but every now and then my music files get renamed. Not all of them, but, for example, this time every song on 24 albums out of about 100. It's always entire albums. When it has happened, I double-click on the song, I get the message saying the "original file could not be found", then I re-find it and it starts playing. When it starts playing, iTunes will usually rename it and/or move it to another folder. Sometimes the album ends up in the "unknown artists" folder, or in the "compilations" folder, but once I track it down (through iTunes "do you want to find it") it gets moved back where it belongs.
It was only this last time that I noticed that these lost files were not only getting moved, but they were getting renamed as well. When everything's working fine, my music has been moved and named like has been renamed by iTunes and looks like "C:\My Music\The Dresden Dolls\The Dresden Dolls\03 Missed Me.mp3". Some process in iTunes or in Windows is renaming only certain albums to look like "C:\My Music\Stephen Lynch\A Little Bit Special\10-Gerbil-Stephen Lynch-A Little Bit Special.mp3".
When the files get renamed like this, iTunes can't find them anymore until I go in and fix things, file by file. This takes forever. If not for the fact that I need to preserve my playlists and my play count numbers, I would just blast the whole library and reimport the folder, but I can't do that.
So, any one have any ideas why this happens, how to keep it from happening, and a way to fix things while preserving my metadata without having to double-click on a few hundred songs?
Windows XP Pro

Actually, I found a good solution based on another question. If I re-import the folder, it finds all of those misnamed files and adds them to the library. Then I tell iTunes to keep my music folder organized, and it fixes all the file names and folders. Then after I make sure the original entries work again, I can sort the list by date added, and delete the new entries.
But I still have no idea why those albums are getting renamed. It's not just the most recent ones or the oldest ones, it's not ones that haven't been played, it's just random-seeming.

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