Need some help managing a (large) iTunes music library

Hopefully someone can help me with my problem(s).
Over time I've accumulated a lot (40,000+) of music in my iTunes and recently I've noticed a lot of dead tracks (shown as "!" next to track)appearing in my library and I can't find the music file in my iTunes music folder.
The good thing is I have a backup of my (most 35,000+) music on an external hard drive. And from the looks of it most of the missing tracks are in my backup drive.
My questions are:
1. Where do these tracks go? and why are they getting 'lost'?
2. What would be the best way to get back these missing tracks (1,000+) back into my library? I can do the whole import (from external drive) process again, but this would create duplicates and I will have a library of 75,000+ songs, half of which will be duplicates.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

The ! shows up when files get moved, renamed, or deleted.
Many times it is an accidental "renaming" when windows changes an external drive letter without telling you.
For example, if a path to a song is F:\itunes\artist\album song one day, and then you plug in a digital camera card. Windows reassigns F: to the camera card and now the path to the song is G:\itunes\artist\album.
Myself, I would do a Get Info and find them one by one, maybe 30 tracks per day.
If you want to re-add them all, you can sort by Date Added and get rid of the duplicates as explained here
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2905
There are also little free programs on the web that say they will fix issues like these, but I don't know any to trust.

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Need some help managing a (large) iTunes music library

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