Thousands of empty playlists

I recently moved from a PC to a Mac and I had thousands of empty playlists in my iTunes library, which I know is a problem from iTunes Match. I thought I could fix the problem on a Mac using the Automator or a script, but now every time I try to do that, iTunes freezes, becomes non-responsive, and nothing happens. As it was, iTunes was taking about 10 minutes to open and become responsive, and then it would only work for a little while before becoming non-responsive again. Now, after running the Automator "Remove Empty Playlists" and a script, the playlists didn't go anywhere, and I can't get iTunes to open at all. 
All day, I've been trying to fix this by turning off iTunes Match on all my iOS devices and getting the script to run, but nothing is working and somehow iTunes is running even worse. I don't know what else to try, but iTunes is completely unusable. Frankly, I don't even know if getting rid of all the playlists would fix the problem. I know I could check by just turning off iTunes Match on my Mac, but it would need to open first for me to do that.
Does anybody have any suggestions?

Hello MrStuntman,
You may need to recreate your iTunes Library. The following article details this process.
iTunes: How to re-create your iTunes library and playlists
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451
Note: After re-creating your library, any devices that you sync with iTunes (Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, iPad) will see your iTunes library as a new library and will completely resync. The next sync with such a device will take longer and may reset some options since your rebuilt library isn't familiar to the device.
Cheers,
Allen

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