Why does iTunes keep reseting my library?

This is the second time this has happened: everything will be working fine (as fine as iTunes 7 can) and then I'll wake up one morning and BAM! - all the songs and delightfully crafted smart playlists will be gone, replaced by no songs and the default playlists iTunes gives you. The music files aren't gone from my hard drive, just the ratings, play counts, date added and last played data and all that stuff iTunes takes care of. I wouldn't be so frustrated, but my smart playlists are either based on the songs' ratings, play counts or how recently they were added.
Last time I had to manually rip them from my iPod using one of those ripping programs (thanks to Apple's refusal to allow iPod to PC synchronising) which took me ages because I'm too stingy to pay for the registered version and had to keep clicking a "buy me" notice every 50 of 3500 songs, as well as changing the date on the computer so the 'date added' data wouldn't be too out of whack.
After the last time this happened I backed up the library xml file, but that was in early October and since then I've added several hundred songs, and it looks like I'll have to do the same procedure again to get back my data. So, is there any way to prevent this from ever happening again? Or, why does this happen to my library at all?

It keeps happening to mine as well. Honestly I think it's something that iTunes (or Apple) does if they find out you haven't been paying over 200 dollars for songs from them. I read an artical about that as well. It doesn't help that when I e-mailed the staff about this, they sent me an e-mail back basically saying: If you bought our songs, then we can return them to you... if not, then it ***** to be you.

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