Anyway I thought I'd give a shot to posting this here, it is starting to happen more frequently. All other workings of the machine are completely hiccup-free. This is now three times that this has happened and it's starting to get annoying.



It's a laptop that I use almost exclusively for my 40 GB media collection, mainly music. Twice now when I have dbl clicked itunes from the desktop to start it, a popup came up which said "populating music library" or something like it was doing it for the first time, and then a few seconds later it said "Error: this library could not be populated and appears to be damaged. Would you like to search the internet for solutions to the problem?" (Or something like that.)



But THIS is the really weird part. When I close the popups, iTunes PROCEEDS TO LOAD a much EARLIER version of my music library that has some 5000 songs less than my current library. I then go into my Music folder, and all the artists and songs from the current library ARE STILL THERE. So I just drag-drop the whole folder into iTunes and it fills in all the blanks. But that's time-consuming and I don't want to have to do it every time I want to listen to some songs from my comp.



Any ideas why this could be happening? As I said, it's happened three times, randomly. As far as I can tell, nothing else is wrong with the computer, and this behavior hasn't happened while attempting to open any other program. I'd tend to doubt I have any kind of malware, either, because I do very little surfing and take super care of my machine. And iTunes USUALLY loads up completely normally, with the full current library.



Can anybody offer any meaningful insight? Thanks

It sounds like your library is corrupt. Try following the info at this link to re-create it. Where are you getting your music files from, one of them might be chocking iTunes.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451

I appreciate the response.

Well, apparently it is a widespread-enough problem, I just did some googling. I actually went to the Apple support forums, too, and apparently a lot of people have this issue.

As it is, it's not that big a deal to just drag/drop the parent folder into itunes to recreate all the missing songs, but that's really just a half-ass temporary solution. When this happened the first time and recreated the library using this method, it would open normally for a couple of weeks, and then it happened again, seemingly at random. Rinse, repeat, and last night it does it AGAIN (after having no problems for about a week).

I agree with you that it is probably a corrupted file (whatever that actually means), but I wonder if there is any way to identify which one? I want to get to the root of the problem.

The majority of the files were imported from cds, and maybe a couple thousand from the itunes store. No limewire, torrents, or any shady apps. Strange. Anyway thx again for the comeback, I'll just have to keep digging.